My passion for history extends back to childhood when I was lucky enough to be taken to mysterious castles and do brass-rubbings in ancient churches while daydreaming about the people whose lives I was touching. When I became a producer/director for BBC TV, I made historical documentaries. As a poet, I wrote individual poems about past lives and a book Ally Pally Prison Camp about first world war civilian internees. I have read hundreds, perhaps thousands, of historical novels, and when I began to write long fiction, of course, I dived back in time. I want novels to take me somewhere I've never been, where essential truths about human beings, their vileness, and their glory, remain unchanged.
The Prisoner's Wife is based on a true story of passion, heroism, and a love that transcends overwhelming odds. Inspired by the true story of a daring deception, a young Czech woman is plunged into the horrors of a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp to be with the English soldier she loves. This astonishing story was told to me in a lift by a World War II prisoner of war and I subsequently visited Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Germany as part of my research for the book, learning largely forgotten aspects of the war. The story can be harrowing at times, but it's essentially about the power of friendship and of love, and the unquenchable human spirit.
This novel about the siege of Leningrad taught me how it is possible to make readers care deeply about huge historical events, by keeping a close focus on one family, and one young woman in particular. This is Helen Dunmore's masterpiece: in storytelling terms, in characterisation, and in placing these people against the ghastly backdrop of Leningrad in 1941, when Hitler's troops surrounded it and tried to starve the city into surrender. The book is based on meticulous research, but the facts are so deeply embedded that they become part of the wallpaper, leaving the reader to powerfully experience the day-to-day horrors through the eyes and ears of the central character.
Called "elegantly, starkly beautiful" by The New York Times Book Review, The Siege is Helen Dunmore's masterpiece. Her canvas is monumental -- the Nazis' 1941 winter siege on Leningrad that killed six hundred thousand -- but her focus is heartrendingly intimate. One family, the Levins, fights to stay alive in their small apartment, held together by the unlikely courage and resourcefulness of twenty-two-year-old Anna. Though she dreams of an artist's life, she must instead forage for food in the ever more desperate city and watch her little brother grow cruelly thin. Their father, a blacklisted writer who once advocated a…
When I first read this book, we hadn't lived through a plague ourselves, and I'm sure it would be even more pertinent for new readers today. I loved this book for what I learned about the history of the bubonic plague, and that my learning was so effortless, as I was completely captured by the book's heroine and the true story of the village of Eyam in Derybyshire. Having seen the fake news and false cures which have emerged during COVID 19, it is even easier than ever to believe the reliance on quack cures and religion, and the accusations of witchcraft that surrounded mortal illness in the 17th Century. As the villagers seal off the village to prevent the spread of the disease we see humanity at its worst and at its best.
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'March' and 'People of the Book'.
A young woman's struggle to save her family and her soul during the extraordinary year of 1666, when plague suddenly struck a small Derbyshire village.
In 1666, plague swept through London, driving the King and his court to Oxford, and Samuel Pepys to Greenwich, in an attempt to escape contagion. The north of England remained untouched until, in a small community of leadminers and hill farmers, a bolt of cloth arrived from the capital. The tailor who cut the cloth had no way of knowing that the damp…
This is a book which blew the top of my head off. I can remember finishing it on a train and thinking, 'Well there's no point in me ever writing another word. I'll never make anything as perfect as this.' This is the most agonisingly vivid book ever written about enslavement. It wriggles into your brain and heart and stays with you forever. The writing is astonishing. The soaring imagination and pinpoint accuracy are breathtaking. Of course, it's normally classified as 'literary fiction', but it's about history, it's by a woman and it's about women, so I think it counts in this list. In 1988, Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved and she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. For once the judges got it absolutely right.
'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…
Is this historical fiction or is it sublime nature writing? Answer: it's both. Melissa Harrison completely immersed me into the rural Sussex world of Edie in 1933, a world unchanged for centuries. It is described in achingly beautiful, hypnotic, poetic language: the kind of prose I'd hoped I would write when I turned from poetry to fiction, but which has so far escaped me. I was utterly captivated by the multi-textured world she creates, and the shock of the ending, and the darkness which lies beneath. I loved the way she trusted the reader to understand what was going on, without spelling it out. Superbly controlled and crafted. I can only stand back and applaud.
'A masterpiece' JON MCGREGOR 'Impossible to forget' THE TIMES 'Astonishing' GUARDIAN 'Startling' FINANCIAL TIMES
WINNER OF THE EU PRIZE FOR LITERATURE
'BOOK OF THE YEAR' NEW STATESMAN, OBSERVER, IRISH TIMES, BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE
The fields were eternal, our life the only way of things, and I would do whatever was required of me to protect it.
The autumn of 1933 is the most beautiful Edie Mather can remember, though the Great War still casts a shadow over the cornfields of her beloved home, Wych Farm.
When charismatic, outspoken Constance FitzAllen arrives from London to write about fading rural traditions, she…
I remember Jane Rogers talking about the book when it was first published and made into a TV series in the 1990s. She said she wrote about the past because it was a way of shining a forensic light onto the issues which surround us today. In this case, the subject was religion - hard to write about in the modern world without treading on toes or being accused of cultural appropriation. But the past belongs to us all. In this way, I can write in The Prisoner's Wife about what happens when Fascism is allowed to flourish, and in my next book, Acts of Love and War about the refugee crisis caused by war. What I particularly admired about Mr. Wroe's Virgins was the way that each section was told from a different character's point of view, examining the complexity of history itself, as well as telling a rollicking good story.
In 1830, as the end of the world approached, the charismatic, hunchbacked prophet of a religious sect settled in Lancashire heeds the biblical injunction and chooses seven virgins 'for comfort and succour'. Basing her novel on the life of the real John Wroe, a leader of a group called the Christian Israelite Church, Rogers crafts an impeccable narrative, interweaving the diverse mindsets of some of the chosen women and the prophet during the nine months of complex interaction. Part morality tale, part history, packed with accurate details of early 19th century life, the stories of Leah, Joanna, Hannah and Martha…
I have been a writer for more than twenty years and have favored pursuing “truth in fiction” rather than “money in formula.” I also spent over thirty years in the corporate world and was exposed to many situations reminiscent of those described in my fiction and in these recommended books. While I support enterprise, “enlightened capitalism” is preferable to the bare-knuckle type we have today, and which seems to resurface whenever regulation weakens. I also find writing novels closer to my lived experience connects me intimately with readers who are looking for socio-political, realist literature.
Avery Mann, a retired pharmaceuticals executive, is in crisis.
His wife dies of cancer, his son’s marriage is on the rocks, his grandson is having a meltdown, and his good friend is a victim of the robocalls scandal that invades the Canadian federal election. Throw in a reckless fling with a former colleague, a fire that destroys his retirement property, and a rumour emerging that the drug he helped bring to market years ago may have been responsible for the death of his wife, and Avery’s life goes into freefall.
Does an octogenarian beekeeper living on Vancouver Island hold the key to Avery’s recovery, a man holding secrets that put lives in jeopardy? Avery races across the country to find out, with crooked bosses, politicians, and assassins on his tail. Joseph spins a cautionary tale of corporate and political greed that is endemic to our times.
Avery Mann, a retired pharmaceuticals executive, is in crisis. His wife dies of cancer, his son’s marriage is on the rocks, his grandson is having a meltdown, and his good friend is a victim of the robocalls scandal that invades the Canadian federal election.
Throw in a reckless fling with a former colleague, a fire that destroys his retirement property, and a rumour emerging that the drug he helped bring to market years ago may have been responsible for the death of his wife, and Avery’s life goes into freefall.
Does an octogenarian bee keeper living on Vancouver Island hold…
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