I read all kinds of novels, but I’m fascinated by the true story in history since truth is so much stranger than fiction – you just couldn’t make anything up that is equally amazing. The stories of real individuals in history tell us so much about how human nature changes, and remains the same, over time. I read my first historical novels as a teenager when there wasn’t a YA fiction as such, and books by Jean Plaidy and Anya Seton taught me how to enter into history rather than just learning facts. I’ve been hooked ever since! It was a hard job to make this selection, but I hope you love the books on my list as much as I do!
The Master is a bravura portrayal of a great writer and a complex, lonely individual. The novel begins when James is at a low point in his writing career. We often forget that great writers have these lows, but for any writer the writing life is full of insecurity and real or imagined failure and James was no exception. At the start of this novel, he has chosen to retreat from public life by buying a house in Rye, England. In this new, private existence, he endures the consequences of his need for a protected space in which to write, and to conceal his sexuality. This, in the context of the notorious Oscar Wilde case.
The Master is a beautiful novel, nuanced and deeply moving. It takes a great writer to pull off a consummate portrayal of another great writer, and Toίbίn is never less than convincing in his evocation of James’ voice and his interior world.
Nineteenth-century writer Henry James is heartbroken when his first play performs poorly in contrast to Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" and struggles with subsequent doubts about his sexual identity.
I am a great fan of Tracey Chevalier’s work, and this is probably my favourite of her novels - a book about fossil hunting, and friendship. The kind of friendship, between two women, that cuts across age and class. It also shapes the era in which they live. This novel shows how the ripples from individual acts and lives spread far and wide, even when those individuals remain relatively unknown. Mary Anning and Elizbeth Philpot form an unlikely, spiky friendship that changes history. One of the best qualities of historical fiction is that it can illuminate both the small and the large scale at the same time. This novel offers us small lives lived in a small town (Lyme Regis) that have (literally) ground-breaking repercussions that change the world. But it is the friendship you will remember. It is a friendship that cuts deep and wounds, but that ultimately transforms both lives.
From the New York Times bestselling novelist, a stunning historical novel that follows the story of Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot, two extraordinary 19th century fossil hunters who changed the scientific world forever.
On the windswept, fossil-strewn beaches of the English coast, poor and uneducated Mary learns that she has a unique gift: "the eye" to spot ammonites and other fossils no one else can see. When she uncovers an unusual fossilized skeleton in the cliffs near her home, she sets the religious community on edge, the townspeople to gossip, and the scientific world alight. After enduring bitter cold, thunderstorms,…
If you are going to write about real historical figures then choosing someone about whom little is known offers a certain freedom. Shakespeare is at once one of the most famous figures in world history and the most mysterious. Of course, we know even less about his wife, except that she was older than him and had three children with him, two of whom survived.
There is a play (forgive the Shakespearian pun) on the theme of naming in this book. The eponymous Hamnett is the son of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway so one might expect the book to be about him, but it is Anne (referred to as Agnes) who will remain with you. Hamnet is also Hamlet, and Shakespeare himself is the only person who isn’t named.
If all this makes the book sound a little tricky and slippery, then I should say that essentially, it is about love and loss and grieving. Very few books make me cry, but I wept my way through the middle section, and have never been able to forget any of the characters since.
WINNER OF THE 2020 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION - THE NO. 1 BESTSELLER 2021 'Richly sensuous... something special' The Sunday Times 'A thing of shimmering wonder' David Mitchell
TWO EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE. A LOVE THAT DRAWS THEM TOGETHER. A LOSS THAT THREATENS TO TEAR THEM APART.
On a summer's day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a sudden fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home?
Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London.
In direct contrast to the technique of choosing the lesser-known character from history, Mantel’s great trilogy offers us portraits of such luminaries as Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Thomas More, and, of course, Thomas Cromwell, the towering central figure in each novel.
It is perhaps cheating to nominate a trilogy. In all three books, however, Mantel takes on the enormous challenge of portraying figures who are so well known as to be stamped on the national imagination, and she does it so well, I believe she has succeeded in altering that imagination. Epic figures such as Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, have been recreated and re-vitalised in her trilogy, but her portrayal of Cromwell, butcher’s boy, diplomat, political savant, and mass murderer, is a particular tour de force.
The historical novel will never be the same again after Mantel!
Winner of the Man Booker Prize
Shortlisted for the the Orange Prize
Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award
`Dizzyingly, dazzlingly good'
Daily Mail
'Our most brilliant English writer'
Guardian
England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey's clerk, and later his successor.
Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with…
An unusual one, this collection of short stories and historical fiction rarely appear in short form. But actually, I was just blown away by the writing! The first story, "Death of the Pugilist" is magnificent, and hard-hitting, if you’ll excuse another terrible pun, but the second, about Alfred Russel Wallace, is both exquisite and exquisitely painful. For those of you who are wondering who Alfred Russel Wallace was, he was a naturalist and explorer, whose contributions allowed Darwin to develop his theory of natural selection and evolution. Obviously, most of the credit has been given to Darwin for this world-changing theory while Wallace, who did not have Darwin’s social standing, remains overlooked, in one of those twists of history that speaks volumes about what is commemorated and what is not. Mason’s wonderful story implicitly questions the historical record, and by implication, history itself.
** Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2021**
From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Winter Soldier and The Piano Tuner comes a collection of interlacing tales of men and women as they face the mysteries and magic of the world.
On a fated flight, a balloonist makes a discovery that changes her life forever. A telegraph operator finds an unexpected companion in the middle of the Amazon. A doctor is beset by seizures, in which he is possessed by a second, perhaps better, version of himself. And in Regency London, a bare-knuckle fighter prepares to face his most…
Succession tells the extraordinary story of Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, who was married three times before she was 15 and had her only child at the age of 13. This son, Henry Tudor, would be taken off her at the age of four and she would spend the next 24 years plotting and campaigning to get him back. he would then go on to found the Tudor dynasty.
Set during the Wars of the Roses, Succession uses original documents and the chronicles of the time to tell this dramatic tale.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
