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.
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…
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. She spends the last six months of the war posing as a British soldier right under the noses of her Nazi guards. 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.
From the time I was a girl, I’ve loved stories that put a lump in my throat even as I’m laughing. As a fiction writer, that funny-sad tone is the one I go for in my own work. I gravitate toward female protagonists of all ages who break the mold—women who are intelligent and strong but who also have unconventional, quirky personalities. Women who can be hilarious, infuriating, and heartbreaking—sometimes all at once. Because they are complex and unique, these women tend to struggle with life’s challenges more than their contemporaries. That’s what makes their stories so interesting, and why I have chosen the books on this list.
When Mar’s husband divorces her, she reacts by abandoning everything in her past: her home, her friends, even her name. Though it's not easy starting over, she’s ready for new adventures—as long as she can keep things casual. Each month, Mar goes from one acquaintance to the next: a fellow gym member down on her luck, a flirty hip-hop instructor, a bossy but comical consultant. . . and a handsome novelist who wants more than she can give. Mar learns from each encounter. But can she open herself up to true connection?
Surrounded by quirky, endearing characters, Mar navigates her…
"A fun, entertaining novel! I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't enjoy this book as much as I did." -Leslie A. Rasmussen, award-winning author
When Mar Meyer's husband divorces her for another woman, she reacts by abandoning everything in her past: her home, her friends, even her name. Though it's not easy to start over, Mar is young-looking, fit, and ready for new adventures-as long as she can keep things casual.
With each passing month, Mar goes from one acquaintance to the next. Among them: a fellow gym member down on her luck, a flirty hip-hop instructor, a bossy but comical…
