Winter, 1607, and a man is struck down in the grounds of Battle Abbey, Sussex. Before dawn breaks, he is dead. Home to the Montagues, Battle has caught the paranoid eye of King James I. The Catholic household is rumoured to shelter those loyal to the Pope, disguising them as servants within the abbey walls. […]
The Winter Guest by WC Ryan
January 1921, and 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 […]
Captain Hazard’s Game by David Fairer
It’s October, 1708. Playing Captain Hazard’s Game brings murder and scandal uncomfortably close, and Widow Trotter and her friends at the Bay-Tree Chocolate House are drawn into a frenzied game of chance and speculation at a time when the market is unregulated. Fortunes are made overnight, and ruin could descend in a single hour. People […]
One Moonlit Night by Rachel Hore
Forced to leave their family home in London after it is bombed in the Blitz, Maddie and her two young daughters take refuge at Knyghton, the beautiful country house in Norfolk where Maddie’s husband Philip spent the summers of his childhood. But Philip is gone, believed to have been killed in action in northern France. […]
The Little Wartime Library by Kate Thompson
London, 1944, and Clara Button is no ordinary librarian. While the world remains at war, in East London Clara has created the country’s only underground library, built over the tracks in the disused Bethnal Green tube station. Down here a secret community thrives: with thousands of bunk beds, a nursery, a café and a theatre […]
The Gifts by Liz Hyder
October 1840. A young woman staggers alone through a forest in Shropshire as a huge pair of impossible wings rip themselves from her shoulders. Meanwhile, when rumours of a ‘fallen angel’ cause a frenzy across London, a surgeon desperate for fame and fortune finds himself in the grips of a dangerous obsession. One that will […]
A Night of Flames by Matthew Harffy
Northumbria, AD 794. Those who rule the seas, rule the land. None know the truth of this more than the Vikings. To compete with the seafaring raiders, the king of Northumbria orders the construction of his own longships under the command of oath-sworn Norseman, Runolf. When the Vikings attack again, the king sends cleric turned […]
Historia interviews: Minette Walters
The award-winning, bestselling author Minette Walters speaks to Frances Owen for Historia. I was delighted to talk to Minette Walters by phone recently to discuss her latest novel, The Swift and the Harrier, set in her home county of Dorset during the English Civil Wars of 1642–51, which is out in paperback today. This is a […]