I consider myself a historian. It isn’t a job title or a career, more of a passion. The object of my passion is the period following the French revolution. When the world, for all its art and elegance, was convulsed by conflict and Napoleon. I shy from the big sweep of events, preferring to tell stories through the words of those who were there. My interest in Nelson and Lady Hamilton grew from my research on the Neapolitan revolution of 1799 and I was shocked to discover that, in addition to their love story, there was a chilling crime disguised and buried beneath their famous romance.
The biography by Hugh Tours is also rather scholarly (I suspect the author is of a legalistic bent) and he sets out with the intention of being scrupulously fair. That is rewarding as is the fact that when the author doesn’t know something, or is supposing something happened, he generally says so. This is nice and balanced and makes the book a great entry point into Emma’s world. It is also reasonably short, which helps the book in its role as a useful primer as does the old-school structure of beginning in the beginning and moving on from there. Don’t expect great wit or sharp prose, though, there are better books for that.
Emma, Lady Hamilton, rose from poverty to become a media celebrity, and her relationship with Admiral Nelson, and her renowned beauty, made her the most instantly-recognisable woman of her era, with the press following her every move. She was a friend of Queen Maria Carolina of Naples, longed-after by the Prince of Wales, and was a high society fashion icon.
Born in 1765, Emma was the daughter of the village blacksmith in Neston, Cheshire, who died just two months later, leaving the family in difficult circumstances. After failing to find a permanent position locally, Emma took the stagecoach to London…
A practising artist for more than 60 years, my main source of inspiration is people and the natural world. I work in a variety of media including painting, sculpture, and printmaking. Drawing is the foundation of my art and I always keep a sketchbook handy. As a left-hander in a right-handed world, drawing became my main means of expression from an early age, when I instinctively wrote back-to-front with my left hand but was made to use my right. In addition to my art practice, I have taught drawing and developed a teaching method based on 7 principles that are outlined in Draw Like da Vinci.
This is an exceptional book on Kollwitz’s drawings with outstanding reproductions of rarely seen works. I find Kollwitz’s humanity deeply moving. As an Expressionist, she champions the plight of the poor and oppressed, especially women and children. Working in the mediums of sculpture and drawing, Kollwitz is a master, or rather a mistress of the human form. A sculptor myself, I appreciate the depth of form in her figure drawing and her use of broad strokes to define planes.
Growing up in Philadelphia, History was in the air I breathed. Reading about my surroundings led me to want to understand the times and the ways people lived in the past. The Classics inspired a love for the cadence of language (especially 19th C lit). Visiting local museums and historic places added fuel to my passion for Historical Fiction. I believe we learn best from history and the human experience through empathy and putting ourselves in other’s shoes, which Historical Fiction is able to do by introducing us to a fascinating array of characters, places and times—real and imagined.
How Jane Digby escaped public notoriety in the present day is miraculous and certainly no reflection of the reputation she garnered in her own time.
If Gertrude Bell pushed the Edwardians into the post-colonial future, Digby forged the path for her. I have to wonder if Bell well knew of Digby’s life in the Middle East after she blithely married and liaised across Europe on her way. Gobsmackingly independent, she cared little for public opinion in making her choices.
The biography of Jane Digby, an 'enthralling tale of a nineteenth-century beauty whose heart - and hormones - ruled her head.' Harpers and Queen
A celebrated aristocratic beauty, Jane Digby married Lord Ellenborough at seventeen. Their divorce a few years later was one of England s most scandalous at that time. In her quest for passionate fulfilment she had lovers which included an Austrian prince, King Ludvig I of Bavaria, and a Greek count whose infidelities drove her to the Orient. In Syria, she found the love of her life, a Bedouin nobleman, Sheikh Medjuel el Mezrab who was twenty…
My fascination with things that go bump in the night probably stems from having read too many scary books in my younger years, when I devoured anything that made me want to hide under the blankets. My love of reading followed me into college, where I earned a B.A. in English from the University of Michigan and later a law degree from DePaul University in Chicago. My passion for reading—and, later, writing—psychological thrillers remained. Today, I write full-time and have five psychological thriller and suspense novels published with Bookouture–Hachette UK, including several that have made it into the Top 100 Books in the Amazon US, UK, and AU Kindle stores!
Little Secrets is both brilliantly written and terrifying, making it one of my all-time favorite psychological thrillers. Eighteen months after Marin’s young son, Sebastian, was kidnapped as she shopped with him at a crowded Seattle market, both Marin and her marriage are hanging on by a thread. Desperate for answers, she hires a PI to help locate additional clues as to what happened to her son. As the secrets begin unraveling, the twists reveal themselves. Jennifer Hillier’s clean writing style and relatable characters drew me in, but the high tension and off-the-charts creep-factor kept me tearing through the pages all the way until the shocking ending.
"Unflinching and unforgettable. Little Secrets has everything you want in a thriller" —Riley Sager, New York Times bestselling author of Lock Every Door
Overwhelmed by tragedy, a woman desperately tries to save her marriage in award-winning author Jennifer Hillier's Little Secrets, a riveting novel of psychological suspense.
All it takes to unravel a life is one little secret...
Marin had the perfect life. Married to her college sweetheart, she owns a chain of upscale hair salons, and Derek runs his own company. They're admired in their community and are a loving family—until their world falls apart the day…
As a historian of race and gender in European women’s history, “misbehaving” women confound me! I am rendered speechless when women negate their own humanity in the drive toward the same power structures that subjugate them. Vulnerable women who were often in the clutches of those same women–and yet are unrelenting in their determination to survive within systems to which others have relegated them–inspire me. These books and their stories take women’s lives–their oft-horrible choices, their scandalous mistakes, and their demands for autonomy–seriously. I hope you find their stories as compelling as I do!
Once I settled in to read the life story of the scandalous 19th-century French femme fatale Marguerite (Meg) Steinheil, I didn’t get back up until I finished. What a ride! Then, I immediately went back to the beginning and read it again.
Meg became notorious in 1899 for literally being in the bed (and the clutches) of the French president when he suddenly died. But wait, there’s more! That’s not even the most incredible moment in her life story. At one point, I started yelling at the book: "Meg, what, no!"
This book has everything you want in a story: murder, sex, scandal, and an unlikely heroine’s pluck and poignancy. History that reads like a novel. What more could you want?
Sex, corruption, and power: the rise and fall of the Red Widow of Paris
Paris, 1889:Margeurite Steinheil is a woman with ambition. But having been born into a middle-class family and trapped in a marriage to a failed artist twenty years her senior, she knows her options are limited.
Determined to fashion herself into a new woman, Meg orchestrates a scandalous plan with her most powerful resource: her body. Amid the dazzling glamor, art, and romance of bourgeois Paris, she takes elite men as her lovers, charming her way into the good graces of the rich and powerful. Her ambitions,…
I was born and raised in a small town in Texas, where I worked on offshore oil rigs as a bartender, a landscaper at a trailer park, and a social worker before attending medical school. I’ve worked as a trauma and burn surgeon for nineteen years. Living an exciting life has made me a better writer (like Hemingway said, “To write about life, first you must live it”), but it has little to do with my passion for mystery/suspense. I read this genre for the best reason, presumably the same as yours: I’m just a huge fan. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I did!
As the rest of this list hints, mystery stories involving unhappily married couples aren’t my usual go-to when picking something to read, nor is it something I particularly enjoy writing about. Maybe that’s a good thing, given the standard advice of “Write what you know,” but generally, the formula (and trust me, it is a formula) bores me.
But at the time I came across this book, I was dabbling with the idea of writing an alternating-first-person-POV book in the way this novel does (as an aside, check out Lucy Foley’s books for other great examples of that device if you’re a fan of it too). I saw the acclaim the book had received and figured, hey, Geneva Rose must have done something right; maybe there’s something there for me to learn here. So, I started the book planning to listen to it mostly as a lesson in this technique.…
One million sold: "A tantalizing premise . . . twists at every turn . . . [A] masterful debut about betrayal and justice" by a New York Times-bestselling author (Samantha M. Bailey, #1 national bestselling author of Watch Out for Her).
Optioned by Picture Perfect Federation for development as a film or TV series
Sarah Morgan is a successful and powerful defense attorney in Washington D.C. As a named partner at her firm, life is going exactly how she planned. The same cannot be said for her husband, Adam. He's a struggling writer who has had little success in his…
I consider myself a historian. It isn’t a job title or a career, more of a passion. The object of my passion is the period following the French revolution. When the world, for all its art and elegance, was convulsed by conflict and Napoleon. I shy from the big sweep of events, preferring to tell stories through the words of those who were there. My interest in Nelson and Lady Hamilton grew from my research on the Neapolitan revolution of 1799 and I was shocked to discover that, in addition to their love story, there was a chilling crime disguised and buried beneath their famous romance.
Flora Fraser, daughter of Lady Antonia, crafted this more sedate biography a few decades ago but it has stood the test of time. There’s less scandal driving the narrative as the author is more measured and allows the material, which is fascinating enough, to speak for itself without improper or unnecessary embellishment. This makes it rather old-school, which I think is also nice, and the author conjures up a rather sympathetic version of Emma, seeing her as loyal and loving, and managing to free her from some of the tawdriness that some other accounts use to grab the reader’s attention.
I was born in Ukraine and moved to the Midwest in the early 1990s. I am the author of two novels: At the End of the World, Turn Left, which was called “elegant and authentic” by NPR and named by Booklist as one of the “Top Ten Crime Debuts” of 2021, and the domestic thriller Breakfall (April 2023). Perhaps one of the oldest literary tropes, affairs up the ante in literary works while simultaneously exploring human nature. Throw an affair into a novel, and most likely, some characters will be blowing up their lives; add it into a mystery novel, and murders are likely to happen.
This is one of my all-time favorite books; while the focus is not an affair exactly, the 1968 Prague-set novel goes into much depth exploring the nature of commitment and monogamy in general. Also, you get wonderful insight into some timeless ideas of what it means to be human, such as this one: "Living, there is no happiness in that.
Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain."
'A cult figure.' Guardian 'A dark and brilliant achievement.' Ian McEwan 'Shamelessly clever ... Exhilaratingly subversive and funny.' Independent 'A modern classic ... As relevant now as when it was first published. ' John Banville
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon; a man torn between his love for her and his womanising. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals; while her other lover stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by choices and events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems…
I love writing about families and what makes them tick: the minor dramas being played out behind every front door, make for intriguing reading. As a journalist, I have interviewed so many people with fascinating stories to tell, and with my fiction I throw my characters into a tricky situation and see what unfolds. Inevitably, if you pull one playing card from the bottom, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. When faced with unexpected challenges, my characters often behave badly, make poor decisions and get themselves into the kind of mess that makes you want to read one more chapter before turning out the light at night.
Jane Fallon does seriously good messed-up families. I’ve read most of her books, but particularly enjoyed this one – the characters aren’t all likeable by any means, but the set-up is great and you’re desperate to find out how things will be resolved. Helen has been having an affair with a married man, Matthew, for four years when he suddenly turns up on her doorstep, announcing he has left his wife and twin daughters; the timing is unfortunate because Helen has just decided she wants to dump him. Rather than doing the sensible thing and knocking the relationship on the head, Helen goes rogue and ends up befriending Matthew’s wife and getting off with his grown-up son (she’s his age, and initially doesn’t know they’re related). Not surprisingly, chaos ensues.
Breaking up is hard to do. Especially when he's left his wife for you . . .
What to do if Matthew, your secret lover of the past four years, finally decides to leave his wife Sophie and their two daughters and move into your flat, just when you're thinking that you might not want him anymore . . .
PLAN A: Stop shaving your armpits. And your bikini line. Tell him you have a moustache that you wax every six weeks. Stop having sex with him. Pick holes in the way he dresses. Don't brush your teeth. Or your…
In my day job I write about art for British newspapers and magazines. I’m lucky enough to spend a lot of
time talking to artists. As a group they’re always one step ahead in identifying important issues and ideas. So
Lapidarium has been fuelled by years of conversations with artists exploring geology as a way to think about
things like migration, ecology, diaspora, empire, and the human body. The book is also embedded in personal experience. stone artefacts from cities I’ve lived in, from Washington D.C. to Istanbul. I’m never happier than
when walking with my dog, so many of the stories in Lapidarium are also rooted in the British landscape.
Sontag’s historic novel focusses on two great romances: the one between Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson and Lady Emma Hamilton, and the other between her husband Sir William Hamilton and the volcano Vesuvius.
Hamilton is the titular ‘volcano lover’ (he also dallied with Etna) who documented the fluctuating moods of the crater with attentive devotion.
He is a fascinating figure – an eighteenth-century diplomat, collector, and connoisseur, he worked at a time when the foundations of modern science were being laid down.
Hamilton’s observations of Vesuvius and the flaming sulphur fields around Naples were recorded in the beautiful Campi Phlegraei.
European men of his time were driven to document, catalogue, name, and impose order on the world, often in a deliberate effort to distance themselves from natural religions and animistic beliefs that prevailed in territories exploited in the colonial era.
Sontag describes Hamilton caught in the balance between the worlds of…
A historical romance, Sontag's book is based on the lives of Sir William Hamilton, his wife, Emma, and Lord Nelson in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Passionately examining the shape of Western civilization since the Age of Enlightenment, Sontag's novel is an exquisitely detailed picture of revolution, the fate of nature, art and love.
