I always wanted to be an archaeologist and literally dig up the past, touching objects telling me about people I could never know. Why did Shetland Celts make spherical stone balls? Whose hand held that bone needle? Was that a natural or a sacrificial death? In a different way, using the great gifts of words and imagination, reading historical fiction satisfies the same desire. Yes, that was what it felt like to work for William I, known in his time as William the Bastard; yes, that was how it felt to fear for your partner’s life every time he went to sea or into battle. Please, let these books open your eyes, your mind, too.
This is the odd one out in my selection, because it was actually written at the time it was set.
It’s Austen’s only novel featuring more mature people, Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth, the man she was forced to jilt when she was a girl. The slow, measured reunion of two people you would like as your friends has to my mind never been better.
'In Persuasion, Jane Austen is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed' Virginia Woolf
Jane Austen's moving late novel of missed opportunities and second chances centres on Anne Elliot, no longer young and with few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she was persuaded by others to break off her engagement to poor, handsome naval captain Frederick Wentworth. What happens when they meet again is movingly told in Austen's last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension,…
Georgette Heyer’s frothy Regency romances are the sort of books you want to read when you have flu – chicken soup for the soul, if you like.
They’re all beautifully researched and wittily written – and they have a Happy Ending that makes you sigh with satisfaction. This is one of her rare serious books, set in Brussels in June, 1815 – the eve of Waterloo.
Yes, there is romance – but it is only part of a serious and gritty examination of warfare at the time.
If you love Bridgerton, you'll love Georgette Heyer!
'The greatest writer who ever lived' ANTONIA FRASER 'My generation's Julia Quinn' ADJOA ANDOH 'One of the wittiest, most insightful and rewarding prose writers imaginable' STEPHEN FRY ___________
1815, and the British and French armies are massing ahead of one of the greatest battles of all time ...
Occupied by the British, Brussels however is en fete.
And Lady Barbara Childe, renowned for being as fashionable as she is beautiful, is at the centre of all that is fashionable and light-hearted.
When she meets Charles Audley, the dashing aide de camp to…
This is another of my go-to books in time of trouble.
Writing in 1871-72, Eliot goes back to the Midlands of her youth at the time of the Reform Act, 1832. So far, so dry as dust, I you say. But Eliot writes so well, creates such wonderful characters and deals with problems that still vex us today, not least the speed of change when you’d rather things stayed the same. But no one could not love the idealistic Dorothea, the frustrated Dr. Lydgate and the poet Will Ladislaw who becomes a great social reformer.
It’s one of the longest novels in the English language, but I’m always so distressed when I have finished it and have to say goodbye to the characters I’ve come to know so intimately.
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
'One of the few English novels written for grown-up people' Virginia Woolf
George Eliot's nuanced and moving novel is a masterly evocation of connected lives, changing fortunes and human frailties in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfilment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his…
The subject – the effects of slavery on the people enslaved – is never going to be easy, and Morrison’s dense prose and time shifts are challenging. At one time I taught the book to British A-level students. They found it hard to understand; I found it hard to explain without sinking to the banal. But I believe it changed all our lives.
'Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours... Beloved is a heart-breaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all' Margaret Atwood, New York Times
Discover this beautiful gift edition of Toni Morrison's prize-winning contemporary classic Beloved
It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her…
Edward Marston is a really prolific writer – he’s written seven or eight series of historical novels.
My personal favourite is the Domesday series, which follows the adventures of a group of men ordered to put right any mistakes in the Domesday Book, which William the Conqueror used to tax his English subjects. En route, Ralph Delchard and his colleagues also find time to solve a brand new crime – proto-private detectives, I suppose. The book roisters along with some strong female characters to lighten the masculine darkness.
The main reason I chose this is because when I read it I contacted the author to say how impressed I was. And then – Reader, I married him!
Hugh Lupus, Earl of Chester, is enraged when his hawk is killed by an arrow in the Forest of Delamere. When two poachers are caught, he orders their execution yet neither of them fired the arrow. As Ralph Delchard and Gervase Bret come to Cheshire to settle a series of disputes between Church and State, they are guests of the Earl. But when they explore the castle and discover that the Prince of Gwynedd is being held there as a hostage, a number of questions arise. Who is trying to rescue him? Why is Idwal, the over-zealous Welsh priest, lurking…
Even as a kid, I was intrigued by the underwater world, so as an adult, I learned to scuba dive. I took to it like a fish to water, and my husband and I spent the next several years traveling to tropical islands to experience the local dive conditions whenever possible. I loved learning how every island had a different culture and a different undersea environment. Since I love tropical islands, scuba diving, mysteries, and adventure stories, these books really hit my sweet spot.
Unsettled weather has caused life-threatening rip currents to sprout up seemingly at random in the usually tranquil sea around Grand Cayman. Despite posted warnings to stay out of the surf, several women lose their life when caught in the turbulent waters. Fin attempts some dangerous rescues, and nearly loses her own life in the process.
Meanwhile, Fin and the team at RIO are struggling to find more sources of funding for the Institute’s important research, and danger arises from an unexpected source while Fin and hot movie star Rafe Cummings are filming an upcoming documentary. When a young internet influencer…
Unsettled weather has caused life-threatening rip currents to sprout up seemingly at random in the usually tranquil sea around Grand Cayman. Despite posted warnings to stay out of the surf, several women lose their life when caught in the turbulent waters. Fin attempts some dangerous rescues, and nearly loses her own life in the process. Meanwhile, Fin and the team at RIO are struggling to find more sources of funding for the Institute’s important research, and danger arises from an unexpected source while Fin and hot movie star Rafe Cummings are filming an upcoming documentary. Soon after a young internet…
It’s the 1860s in rural England. Matthew Rowsley has just been appointed as Lord Croft’s land agent. He finds he can’t improve the land, however, without taking an interest in the people living on it – and he worries as much when a housemaid vanishes as much as when his lordship disappears. Can Mrs. Faulkner, the housekeeper, explain? Together they discover that there is something rotten at the heart of Thorncroft.
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