Essie Fox reviews a new historical crime mystery set in 18th-century Paris which ranges from the slums of Paris to the glittering halls of Versailles and takes in true crime, ingenious inventions, Enlightenment philosophy and the journey of three young women who struggle to take power over their own lives: The Clockwork Girl by Anna […]
London in 1708: a surprisingly modern city
London in the early 18th century was, David Fairer argues, a surprisingly modern city, with troubles not unlike our own: unreliable news, questionable financial deals, vicious party politics. Yet it’s a period that’s been neglected in historical fiction. His trio of books set in a chocolate house aims to change that. A royal scandal, party […]
The Clockwork Girl by Anna Mazzola
Paris, 1750. And in the midst of an icy winter, as birds fall frozen from the sky, chambermaid Madeleine Chastel arrives at the home of the city’s celebrated clockmaker and his clever, unworldly daughter. Madeleine is hiding a dark past, and a dangerous purpose: to discover the truth of the clockmaker’s experiments and record his […]
Daughters of Night by Laura Shepherd-Robinson
London, 1782. Desperate for her politician husband to return home from France, Caroline ‘Caro’ Corsham is already in a state of anxiety when she finds a well-dressed woman mortally wounded in the bowers of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. The Bow Street constables are swift to act, until they discover that the deceased woman was a […]
Fortune’s Heir by Alex Rutherford
In his Himalayan retreat of Glenmire, Nicholas Ballantyne is determined his days of bloodshed and intrigue in the service of the British East India Company are over. Yet the Battle of Plassey, where he fought with Robert Clive, has delivered only a short-lived peace and the 1770s are precarious times in India. Martial Marathas, formidable […]
Pandora by Susan Stokes-Chapman
London, 1799. Dora Blake is an aspiring jewellery artist who lives with her uncle in what used to be her parents’ famed shop of antiquities. When a mysterious Greek vase is delivered, Dora is intrigued by her uncle’s suspicious behaviour and enlists the help of Edward Lawrence, a young antiquarian scholar. Edward sees the ancient […]
Asylums and prisons: locking women away in madhouses
Nicola Pryce tells Historia about the historical background to her latest novel, which touches on various kinds of imprisonment; the most shocking is the 18th-century practice of locking inconvenient women away in madhouses, as she explains. The Cornish Captive is the sixth novel in my Cornish series. My heroine is mentioned before in passing but […]
Historical books to look out for in 2022
Our popular annual list of books to look out for during the year is back for 2022, with history, biography and historical fiction. Here are books to read from HWA authors covering eras from Ancient Rome to the 1980s and sweeping across continents from China to Russia and India, the USA to Australia and the […]