A pioneering library was set up at Endell Street Military Hospital during the First World War. There, the women who ran the hospital used reading as therapy for the damaged soldiers. Louise Morrish writes about the library, which inspired her latest novel, and asks: can books save lives? If we could step back in time, […]
Historian or novelist? Writing fiction based on facts
Is the historical fiction author a historian or novelist? Julie Owen Moylan considers her own experience of writing a novel based on the known facts about two iconic women in the 1950s. Writing about real people is a challenging enterprise for both novelist and historian. How can we best sum up a life of many […]
Turning Welsh history into fiction: the Mynydd Epynt clearances
The Mynydd Epynt clearances of 1940, when a Welsh mountain community was evicted to make way for a military training ground, inspired Luisa A Jones’s latest book, Before the Mountain Falls. Here she talks about turning history into fiction: how she researched, what she kept, the historical novelist’s responsibility to the past. In the spring […]
Before the Mountain Falls by Luisa A Jones
In 1939, Norma knows what the world does to women in her position. Pregnant, unmarried… abandoned. And when the man who promised to marry her is arrested for murder, she has only one option left: run. A borrowed wedding ring. A fake name. A one-way ticket to Wales. Mrs Finch never existed before that train […]
The Boleyn Curse by Alexandra Walsh
The court of young King Henry VIII seethes with secrets and scandals, but every ambition has its price. Elizabeth Boleyn, loyal wife to Thomas Boleyn and devoted mother to Anne, Mary and George, believes she can navigate the shifting tides of court life. But when she catches the eye of the lascivious king, Elizabeth is […]
Murder at the Tower by NR Daws
An excitable and clumsy Reverend Weaver is leading a church service at the Tower of London. It’s meant to be a special honour, but when one of the ladies in the congregation drops dead from poison, the Reverend finds himself under arrest as the number one suspect. After all, the murdered lady in question was […]
The Midnight Carousel by Fiza Saeed McLynn
Paris, 1914, and Detective Laurent Bisset has reluctantly closed a most puzzling case. Fairgoers have been vanishing while riding a dazzling carousel. The only man who could be responsible is behind bars – but Laurent cannot explain what happened to those missing. Chicago, 1920, and Maisie Marlowe acquires a beautiful, antique carousel, and sets up […]
The Alchemist’s Secret by Clare Marchant
When Paige returns to her ancestral family home, Woodham Hall, she’s nursing an unbearable heartbreak. The man she’d thought she loved has told her the most terrible lie, one she feels she’ll never recover from. The only thing that seems to be able to hold her interest is the story of a poisoning that once […]