Brilliant. This book is like Jane Austen among the eucalyptus, but with so much more sex.
Historical Fiction
The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
I’ve never been a fan of books too big to read in the bath; even the quality of this one makes it no exception. And spoiler alert; Cromwell dies at the end.
A Well Behaved Woman by Theresa Anne Fowler
Tombland by CJ Sansom
What a pleasure it is to be back in the company of hunchback lawyer Matthew Shardlake, the thinking woman’s sixteenth century crumpet. Tombland is the seventh novel in the Shardlake series and reading the first six is necessary pleasure, so please go and do that before beginning this one. It’s the best historical fiction series I’ve encountered. […]
22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson
This very good but slightly harrowing book will make you grateful for your comfortable bed and fridge full of food. During World War Two, Silvania and her infant son, Aurek, flee Warsaw. After a series of horrors she ends up in the forest with a toddler, barely surviving through freezing winters and burning summers, so […]
Blood and Beauty by Sarah Dunant
My, what a nasty lot those Borgias were. Rodrigo Borgia became pope in 1492; he had several illegitimate children and very little Godliness about him. The novel is well written and adequately details the vice and corruption of Borgia’s reign but it’s hard to really care about him or his family as they’re all so […]
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Love this one. A fascinating look into the lives of black maids and their white employers in Mississippi in 1962.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusack
This is one of those books everybody else seems to love more than me. Sure it’s interesting to have a book narrated by Death and there’s a lot of interesting parts in it, but somehow it just doesn’t move me.