Rome in 1938, and as the world teeters on the brink of war, talented pianist Eva Valenti enters the house of widower Dante Cavallera to become his new wife. On the outside, the forces of Fascism are accelerating, but in her new home, Eva fears that something else is at work, whispering in the walls […]
Henrietta Maria by Leanda de Lisle
Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s queen, is the most reviled consort in British history. Condemned as the ‘Popish brat of France’ and a ‘notorious whore’, she remains in popular memory the woman who turned the king Catholic — and so causing a civil war — and a cruel and bigoted mother. Leanda de Lisle unpicks these […]
Battle Song by Ian Ross
1264, and storm clouds are gathering as Simon de Montfort and the barons of the realm challenge the power of Henry III. The barons demand reform; the crown demands obedience. England is on the brink of civil war. Adam de Norton, a young squire devoted to the virtues of chivalry, longs only to be knighted, […]
Widows of the Ice by Anne Fletcher
As Captain Scott lay freezing and starving to death on his return journey from the South Pole, he wrote with a stub of pencil his final words: ‘For God’s sake look after our people.’ Uppermost in his mind were the three women who would now be widows: Kathleen, his own bohemian artist wife; Oriana, the […]
A Bitter Remedy by Alis Hawkins
Jesus College, Oxford, 1881. An undergraduate is found dead at his lodgings and the medical examination reveals some shocking findings. When the young man’s guardian blames the college for his death and threatens a scandal, Basil Rice, a Jesus College fellow with a secret to hide, is forced to act and finds himself drawn into […]
Resurrection by David Gilman
Somewhere in the Sahara, on the desolate border between Sudan and Chad, a P51 Mustang with long-range drop tanks slowly emerges from the dunes. Inside, the skeletalised remains of a man missing for three decades. His flying jacket bears no insignia, a worn leather attaché case lies by his side, held securely by a manacle […]
Historia giveaway: Chris Lloyd novels
Historia is giving away five prizes to celebrate Paris Requiem, Chris Lloyd’s World War Two noir novel, coming out in paperback! Five winners will each get copies of both of Chris’s Eddie Giral novels, set in the opening months of the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1940. The first in the series, The Unwanted Dead, […]
Acts of Love and War by Maggie Brookes
Twenty-one-year-old Lucy is frustrated with her constrained life in Hertfordshire, teaching and keeping house for her domineering father. But she is happy to be living next door to Tom and Jamie, two brothers she has known since childhood, and whom she loves equally. Her life is turned upside down when, in 1936, Tom decides he […]