“I still dream, every night, of Polneath on fire…” By day, Ivy Boscawen mourns the loss of her son Tim in the Great War. But by night she mourns another boy – one whose death decades ago haunts her still. For Ivy is sure that there is more to what happened all those years ago: […]
The Winter Guest by WC Ryan
January 1921. Though the Great War is over, in Ireland a new, civil war is raging. The once-grand Kilcolgan House, a crumbling bastion shrouded in sea-mist, lies half empty and filled with ghosts – both real and imagined – the Prendevilles, the noble family within, co-existing only as the balance of their secrets is kept. […]
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 […]
Erich Karl, one of the first children saved
Clare Mulley, the award-winning historian and broadcaster, tells Historia about some astonishing news which led her to speak to one of the first child survivors of World War One who was helped, over a century ago, by the newly-formed Save the Children. History often holds remarkable surprises, but only rarely does it seem to circle […]
The Crystal Crypt by Fiona Veitch Smith
“But accidents can still happen… Perhaps there was something out of her control, something she couldn’t have foreseen…” “Like someone plotting to kill her?” Reporter sleuth Poppy Denby is asked to investigate the mysterious death of an up-and-coming female scientist in an Oxford laboratory known as the Crystal Crypt. The official verdict is that Dr […]
Imagining Somerville: a research mystery
You have the perfect location for your next book, but it’s not open to the public. Never mind, you’re going to an event there – and then the Covid lockdown happens. How are you going to research it now? This was the puzzle Fiona Veitch Smith faced while writing her latest Poppy Denby mystery, set […]
Should historical authors feel guilt when they write real people as antiheroes?
What responsibility has an author of historical fiction towards real people who they write as antiheroes in a novel? Should authors feel guilty about how they portray them? AJ West, whose debut novel, The Spirit Engineer, takes people who have living descendants as its close inspiration, considers this dilemma. I don’t believe in ghosts, though […]
A Woman Made of Snow by Elisabeth Gifford
It’s 1949. Caroline Gillan and her new husband Alasdair have moved back to Kelly Castle, his dilapidated family estate in the middle of nowhere. Stuck caring for their tiny baby, and trying to find her way with an opinionated mother-in-law, Caroline feels adrift, alone and unwelcome. But when she is tasked with sorting out the […]