Judith Allnatt reviews Acts of Love and War by Maggie Brookes, a book set during the Spanish Civil War which “cannot fail to move the reader.” Lucy Nicholson has loved the Murray brothers, Tom and Jamie, ever since they moved next door when she was only six years old. Now in their 20s, with the […]
Review: The Clockwork Girl by Anna Mazzola
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 […]
Review: A Night of Flames by Matthew Harffy
Jemahl Evans reviews Matthew Harffy’s A Night of Flames, set in Northumbria and Norway in the late 8th century, and finds it rich with “humour and heartbreak, and a plot which rattles along at a breathless pace”. I am always chuffed when I get one of Matthew Harffy’s books to review. A Night of Flames […]
Review: The Forgotten by Mary Chamberlain
Sarah Day reviews Mary Chamberlain’s new novel, The Forgotten, a “compelling mystery” set in Berlin in 1945 and London in the late 1950s. Most of us encounter the history of the Second World War at some point in the school curriculum. I remember learning about the rise of Nazism, the horrors of the Holocaust, the […]
Review: The Good Death by SD Sykes
Catherine Hokin reviews The Good Death by SD Sykes and finds it “a book to get lost in” and a story for our times. The Good Death is the fifth book in SD Sykes’s 14th-century Oswald de Lacy series of which I have been a fan since book one. I remain a staunch fan with […]
Review: The White Rajah by Tom Williams
Author Deborah Swift embarks on an adventure in the South China Seas to review Tom Williams’s reissued novel, The White Rajah, and finds much to enjoy. I’d never heard of James Brooke before reading Tom Williams’s excellent biographical novel, so I have been educated as well as entertained. Set at the beginning of the 19th […]
Review: Fortune’s Soldier by Alex Rutherford
Novelist and historian Richard Hopton reviews Alex Rutherford’s latest novel, Fortune’s Soldier, for Historia. Fortune’s Soldier is Alex Rutherford’s latest Indian historical epic, a successor to the Empire of the Moghul sextet. Set in the years between 1744 and 1757, it takes on a controversial period in Indian history. For old-fashioned British imperialists it represents […]
Review: The Prophet by Martine Bailey
Martine Bailey’s latest novel The Prophet is a sequel to 2019’s The Almanack and is another beautifully crafted story balanced on the cusp of the old world and the new, writes Catherine Hokin. The Almanack took place in 1752 against a backdrop of the transition from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar and the ‘lost […]