Clare Mulley has written a fascinating biography about two fascinating women. You would have thought that two women who grew up in post-World War One Germany with a love for flying and an intense urge to succeed in becoming pilots, would have been allies, even friends. Instead, Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg (nee Schiller) […]
Aphra Behn: A Secret Life by Janet Todd
There is nothing Janet Todd doesn’t know about the Restoration playwright, Aphra Behn; her acclaimed 1996 biography is testimony to this. Twenty years on she has returned to this work, updating it with subtle textual revisions and a new introduction: Aphra Behn: A Secret Life is the result. In the years separating these editions historical […]
The Tyrant’s Shadow by Antonia Senior
Revisiting characters from the critically acclaimed Treason’s Daughter, Antonia Senior has set her new novel, The Tyrant’s Shadow, some years later in the wake of the English Civil Wars. This series of brutal conflicts has left no family untouched by tragedy and division. The country is reeling, religious sects await the second coming and power […]
Corpus by Rory Clements
During the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, a young Englishwoman delivers vital forged documents to a Jewish scientist. This is her first ‘assignment’, she is out of her depth and justifiably scared – and in a very short time she lies dead of an apparent heroin overdose in a Cambridge bedroom. So begins Rory Clements’ […]
The Vanishing by Sophia Tobin
The Vanishing, Sophia Tobin’s third novel, tells the story of a young orphan, Annaleigh, and the isolated house on the Yorkshire Moors where she becomes housekeeper, the shadowy and secretive White Windows owned by Marcus Twentyman and his sister Hester. As this short premise suggests, this is a novel firmly in the Gothic genre. Annaleigh […]
The Last Days of Leda Grey by Essie Fox
Essie Fox has established a fine reputation as a writer of gothic novels and though her previous books have been set in Victorian times, the Edwardian era of silent movies seems like a very natural backdrop for gothic fiction. The images in these old flickering black and white films with their beautifully mute but vampish […]
The Devil’s Feast by M.J. Carter
Some reviews come with spoiler alerts, this one comes with a warning: reading M.J. Carter’s wonderful The Devil’s Feast will leave you both incredibly hungry and far too scared to eat. It may be the best diet book I have ever read. The Devil’s Feast is the third outing for Victorian investigative duo Captain William […]
Winter is Coming by Carolyne Larrington
Writing in the Guardian newspaper in December, 2015 Carolyne Larrington, author of Winter is Coming, The Medieval World of Game of Thrones says: “Both the show and the book sequence on which it’s based, George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, reflect very closely the cultures, beliefs and practices of (the Medieval) era. […]