On the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth, Katherine Clements reviews a new ‘biography with a twist’. Emily, the elusive Brontë sister, is often portrayed as antisocial, difficult, perhaps even slightly unhinged. Two centuries of Brontë scholarship have created an inscrutable image of this singular woman; Emily as enigma has become integral to Brontë myth making. […]
Review: The Story Keeper by Anna Mazzola
“It was the birds that woke her, their liquid voices trickling into her dreams.” An apt quote from a novel that does precisely that: trickles in and won’t let you go. Anna Mazzola’s second novel The Story Keeper is inspired by the West Ham vanishings: the unexplained disappearance of a number of children and young […]
The Coffin Path by Katherine Clements
The Coffin Path is a seventeenth-century ghost story. A story in which the oppression and wild beauty of the Yorkshire moors provides a compelling backdrop, where a sense of encroaching malevolence seeps like a ‘winding sheet of fog … silent, still, watching’ through the very stones of Scarcross Hall, and the fates of all who live there. Scarcross […]
The Good Doctor of Warsaw by Elisabeth Gifford
Elizabeth Gifford’s debut novel, Secrets of the Sea House, was a sweeping, beautiful work, imbued with myth and mystery; it was shortlisted for the HWA Debut Crown award in 2014 and was one of my personal favourites that year. Gifford is a talented writer with the ability to create satisfying stories and haunting atmosphere from […]
Pleasing Mr Pepys by Deborah Swift
Deb Willet, companion to Elizabeth, the wife of Samuel Pepys, takes centre stage in this intriguing tale of love, espionage and murder in Restoration London. Deb takes the position in Pepys’ household in order to escape from the tyranny of sour-faced Aunt Beth. Deb’s father is in Ireland about his business affairs; her mother deserted […]
The Zealot’s Bones by D.M. Mark
On August 10th, 1849, a vicious form of Asiatic cholera (which would ravage all parts of Britain) made its appearance in Hull. This terrible scourge devastated the city for three months and killed 1,860 – a rate of one in 43 of the population. D.M. Mark uses this grim year in the City of Culture’s […]
A Column of Fire by Ken Follett
“What a life that man had led: first a farmer in West Africa, then a soldier, then a prisoner of war, a slave in Seville, a soldier again in the Netherlands and at last a rich Antwerp iron maker.” An epic sweep of a life in an epic sweep of a book. Ken Follett’s A […]
The Woman in the Shadows by Carol Mcgrath
Carol McGrath has left the 11th century to add yet another book to the already crowded shelves of Tudor novels. As somebody who writes about the 19th-century, I have always struggled with the wild enthusiasm that people seem to feel for books about the Tudors, but The Woman in the Shadows has brought the period alive for […]