I’m a historian who recently started writing historical fiction. A few years ago, while writing my most recent academic book about 19th C Dublin, I became frustrated with the limitations of what I felt I could write about. I had a lot of sense of the atmosphere of the city that didn’t really fit into the way an academic book is constructed. So, I ended up trying my hand at historical fiction, wanting to give a real sense of place that I felt to be true but which was also a product of my imagination. One of my favorite things about reading novels has always been this sense of place.
I love this book because of the intricate links between a variety of very distinct characters. Setterfield tells wonderful individual stories and then brings them all together in a surprising and satisfying way. I enjoyed trying to piece the mystery together.
The river itself is a character who can alter lives for better or worse, providing life and livelihood or taking them away. Setterfield really leans into the river’s atmosphere (mists, floods, and miasmas), so this is a novel that you feel and smell as well as read.
From the instant #1 New York Times bestselling author of the “eerie and fascinating” (USA TODAY) The Thirteenth Tale comes a “swift and entrancing, profound and beautiful” (Madeline Miller, internationally bestselling author of Circe) novel about how we explain the world to ourselves, ourselves to others, and the meaning of our lives in a universe that remains impenetrably mysterious.
On a dark midwinter’s night in an ancient inn on the river Thames, an extraordinary event takes place. The regulars are telling stories to while away the dark hours, when the door bursts open on a grievously wounded stranger. In his…
I love a book with its own language and logic where you feel you have been let into a secret world. This book is full of the wonderful and sometimes humorous language that results from the collision of cultures involved in the opium trade, which ties the characters of the book together.
The trade is slowly poisoning India and China, bringing families to ruin while enriching England. I love a book where social commentary arises naturally from the sympathetic portrayal of people in impossible situations and where even a dark situation contains hope and the possibility of love. The Ganges plays a central role in the characters’ lives and in the movement of the story.
At the heart of this epic saga, set just before the Opium Wars, is an old slaving-ship, The Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean, its crew a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a truly diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt Raja to a widowed villager, from an evangelical English opium trader to a mulatto American freedman. As their old family ties are washed away they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais or ship-brothers. An…
This book is the definition of atmospheric. You can almost taste the swampy air of the Florida Everglades as you wend your way through a landscape of ruthless chancers and escaped slaves. I love the sense of menace and mystery that Mathieson captures in this, as well as the deep sense of place.
I have never been to the Everglades, but I suspect that if I did, I’d be disappointed that it didn’t live up to the place of my imagination after reading this book. If you liked Where the Crawdads Sing, I urge you to try this book, which is much better written and more interesting!
Drawn from fragments of historical fact, Matthiessen's masterpiece brilliantly depicts the fortunes and misfortunes of Edgar J. Watson, a real-life entrepreneur and outlaw who appeared in the lawless Florida Everglades around the turn of the century.
In school, we were required to read several Mark Twain books, including Huckleberry Finn, and I think I read them fairly uncritically. What I love about this book is how it takes a familiar, almost traditional, American story and inverts it by changing the point of view. Told from the perspective of the runaway slave (Jim/James) instead of Huck, the story is imbued with much more threat, violence and also importance.
The escape along the river is no longer a caper but a journey of life or death where success probably means surrendering loved ones forever. You might know the plot, but in fact, this is a completely different story.
'Truly extraordinary books are rare, and this is one of them' - Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize-winning author of Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha
James by Percival Everett is a profound and ferociously funny meditation on identity, belonging and the sacrifices we make to protect the ones we love, which reimagines The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. From the author of The Trees, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Erasure, adapted into the Oscar-winning film American Fiction.
The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new…
I love the central female character in this book, Cora Seaborne, who can swing between admirable and ridiculous over the course of a page. I love the dark atmosphere created by the marshes of the Blackwater, where Cora is determined to find evidence of a mysterious creature presumed by locals to be malevolent.
The estuary is a menacing presence in reality (people and animals are sucked in and lost in times of bad weather) and in the imaginations of the villagers. I also love the way that this provides a backdrop for various tumults of the soul experienced by the characters as Cora crashes into the settled lives of a local minister and his family, wreaking accidental havoc.
Now a major Apple TV series starring Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston
THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER
'A blissful novel of unapologetic appetites ... here is a writer who understands life' JESSIE BURTON, author of THE MINIATURIST
London, 1893. When Cora Seaborne's controlling husband dies, she steps into her new life as a widow with as much relief as sadness. Along with her son Francis - a curious, obsessive boy - she leaves town for Essex, in the hope that fresh air and open space will provide refuge.
On arrival, rumours reach them that the mythical Essex Serpent, once…
My book opens in 1866 with the discovery of a baby’s body in the River Liffey. Denis and his wife, Rose, are mourning the loss of their first child in birth, and Denis feels a need to see justice for the discovered victim. He alerts the police, and Detective Martin Peakin begins an investigation that brings him from workhouses and tenements to Dublin’s better squares in search of a woman who might have killed her own child.
The novel is told from multiple points of view as the investigation takes its toll on the lives of all involved. A central character is the river which shapes Dublin, dividing it in half and carrying within it things the city’s residents want to hide.
Growing up in New England, my mother had a set of books that she kept in the living room, more for display than anything else. It was The Works of Edgar Allen Poe. I read them and instantly became hooked on horror. In the seventh grade, I entertained my friends at a sleepover by telling them the mysterious clanking noise (created by the baseboard heater) was the ghost of a woman who had once lived in the farmhouse, forced to cannibalize her ten children during a particularly bad winter. And I’ve been enjoying scaring people ever since.
In 1939, on a remote Pacific island, botanical researcher Irene Greer plunged off a waterfall to her death, leaving behind a legacy shrouded in secrets. Her great-niece Julia, a struggling journalist recovering from a divorce, seeks answers decades later.
Tasked with retrieving Dr. Greer’s discovery–a flower that could have world-changing properties–Julia unearths a story rife with hidden agendas and a missionary community unwilling to share the truth. As she confronts the eerie legends and a fellow traveler with his own motives, Julia finds that the longer she stays, the thinner the line between reality and the fantastical becomes until she…
From the award-winning author of Dead Souls and Poe comes an all-new bone-chilling novel where a mysterious island holds the terrifying answers to a woman's past and future.
In 1939, on a remote Pacific island, botanical researcher Irene Greer plunges off a waterfall to her death, convinced the spirits of her dead husband and daughter had joined the nightmarchers-ghosts of ancient warriors that rise from their burial sites on moonless nights. But was it suicide, or did a strange young missionary girl, Agnes, play a role in Irene's deteriorating state of mind?
