Genre roundup: Historical fiction and non-fiction
Bookhugger’s publishers present a broad-range of fiction and non-fiction, from a lesser-known Conan Doyle hero, a study of Russia’s ravaged history, visiting the ladies and gentlemen of the court of Kensington Palace during the reign of George II, to the ultimate question in English literature: who did write Shakespeare’s plays?
The Complete Brigadier Gerard, by Arthur Conan Doyle
Mon Dieu! The extraordinary, sabre-rattling adventures of Gerard, a young French cavalry officer in the time of the Napoleonic wars, introduce a hero who will be adored by fans of Flashman and Sherlock Holmes alike. Gathered here in one edition are both volumes of Conan Doyle’s much loved tales, which will delight modern readers with their absurdist humour, infectious warmth and swash-buckling energy.
The Ghost Rider, by Ismail Kadare
An old woman is awoken in the dead of night by knocks at her front door. The woman opens it to find her daughter, Doruntine, standing there alone in the darkness. She has been brought home from a distant land by a mysterious rider she claims is her brother Konstandin. But unbeknownst to her, Konstandin has been dead for years. What follows is chain of events which plunges a medieval village into fear and mistrust. Who is the ghost rider?
The Last Station, by Jay Parini
1910. Anna Karenina and War and Peace have made Leo Tolstoy the world’s most famous author. But fame comes at a price. In the tumultuous final year of his life, Tolstoy is desperate to find respite, so leaves his large family and the hounding press behind and heads into the wilderness. Too ill to venture beyond the tiny station of Astapovo, he believes his last days will pass in peaceful isolation. But the battle for Tolstoy’s soul will not be so simple.
The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, by Andrew McConnell Stott
The son of a deranged Italian immigrant, Joseph Grimaldi (1778-1837) was the most celebrated of English clowns. The first to use white-face make-up and wear outrageous coloured clothes, he completely transformed the role of the Clown in the pantomime with a look as iconic as Chaplin’s tramp or Tommy Cooper’s magician. One of the first celebrity comedians, his friends included Lord Byron and the actor Edmund Kean, and his memoirs were edited by the young Charles Dickens. But underneath the stage paint, Grimaldi struggled with depression and his life was blighted with tragedy. His first wife died in childbirth and his son would go on to drink himself to death. The outward joy and tomfoolery of his performances masked a dark and depressing personal life, and instituted the modern figure of the glum, brooding comedian. Joseph Grimaldi left an indelible mark on the English theatre and the performing arts, but his legacy is one of human struggle, battling demons and giving it his all in the face of adversity.
The Red Queen, by Philipa Gregory
The second book in Philippa’s stunning new trilogy, The Cousins War, brings to life the story of Margaret Beaufort, a shadowy and mysterious character in the first book of the series – The White Queen – but who now takes centre stage in the bitter struggle of The War of the Roses.
The Red Queen tells the story of the child-bride of Edmund Tudor, who, although widowed in her early teens, uses her determination of character and wily plotting to infiltrate the house of York under the guise of loyal friend and servant, undermine the support for Richard III and ultimately ensure that her only son, Henry Tudor, triumphs as King of England. Through collaboration with the dowager Queen Elizabeth Woodville, Margaret agrees a betrothal between Henry and Elizabeth’s daughter, thereby uniting the families and resolving the Cousins War once and for all by founding of the Tudor dynasty.
The Oath, by Michael Jecks
1326. In an England riven with conflict, knight and peasant alike find their lives turned upside down by the warring factions of Edward II, with his hated favourite, Hugh le Despenser, and Edward’s estranged queen Isabella and her lover, Sir Roger Mortimer. Yet even in such times the brutal slaughter of an entire family, right down to a babe in arms, still has the power to shock. Three further murders follow, and bailiff Simon Puttock is drawn into a web of intrigue, vengeance, power and greed as Roger Mortimer charges him to investigate the killings.
Michael Jecks brilliantly evokes the turmoil of fourteenth-century England, as his well-loved characters Simon Puttock and Sir Baldwin de Furnshill strive to maintain the principles of loyalty and truth.
Day After Night, by Anita Diamant
Atlit is a holding camp for “illegal” immigrants in Israel in 1945. There, about 270 men and women await their future and try to recover from their past. Diamant, with infinite compassion and understanding, tells the stories of the women gathered in this place.
Shayndel is a Polish Zionist who fought the Germans with a band of partisans. Leonie is a Parisian beauty. Tedi is Dutch, a strapping blond who wants only to forget. Zorah survived Auschwitz. Haunted by unspeakable memories and too many losses to bear, these young women, along with a stunning cast of supporting characters who work in or pass through Atlit, begin to find salvation in the bonds of friendship and shared experience, as they confront the challenge of re-creating themselves and discovering a way to live again.
A Plague of Heretics, by Bernard Knight
With the city of Exeter ravaged by an outbreak of the ‘yellow plague’, Sir John de Wolfe, the county coroner, must divide his time between visiting his brother Willam who has been struck down by the disease, and dealing with a series of brutal murders which appears to be linked to a revival of heresy in the city.
When some of the cathedral canons begin a crusade against this danger to the Church, Sir John is accused of being too sympathetic to the heretics, bringing him into conflict with the ecclesiastical authorities. As the situation worsens, the coroner finds himself having to seek sanctuary in order to save his skin. Can he survive long enough to unmask the real killer?
A Gambling Man, by Jenny Uglow
From acclaimed biographer Jenny Uglow, a portrait of Charles II and the first decade of the Restoration: a time of glamour and gossip, drama and risk, faction and crisis.
Charles II was thirty when he crossed the channel in fine May weather in 1660. His Restoration was greeted with maypoles and bonfires, like spring after the long years of Cromwell’s rule. But there was no going back, no way he could ‘restore’ the old. Certainty had vanished. The divinity of kingship fled with his father’s beheading. ‘Honour’ was now a word tossed around in duels. ‘Providence’ could no longer be trusted. As the country was rocked by plague, fire and war, people searched for new ideas by which to live. Exactly ten years later Charles would stand again on the shore at Dover, laying the greatest bet of his life in a secret deal with his cousin, Louis XIV.
The Restoration decade was one of experiment: from the science of the Royal Society to the startling role of credit and risk, from the shocking licence of the court to the failed attempts at toleration of different beliefs. Negotiating all these, Charles, the ‘slippery sovereign’, layed odds and took chances, dissembling and manipulating his followers. The theatres were restored, but it was the king who was the supreme actor. Yet while his grandeur, his court and his colourful sex life were on display, his true intentions lay hidden.
A Gambling Man is a portrait of Charles II, exploring his elusive nature through the lens of these ten vital years – and a portrait of a vibrant, violent, pulsing world, in which the risks the king took forged the fate of the nation, on the brink of the modern world.
Courtiers, by Lucy Worsley
From Lucy Worsley, Chief Curator of the Historic Royal Palaces, a hugely engaging book about the men and women who lived and worked at Kensington Palace.
Ambitious and talented people flocked to court in search of power and prestige, but Kensington Palace was also a gilded cage. While its inhabitants were cocooned in comfort and splendour, successful courtiers had level heads and cold hearts; their secrets were never safe. Among them, a Vice Chamberlain with many vices, a Maid of Honour with a secret marriage, a pushy painter, an alcoholic equerry, a Wild Boy, a penniless poet, a dwarf comedian, two mysterious turbaned Turks and any number of discarded royal mistresses.
An eye-opening portrait of an enthralling group of royal servants, Courtiers also throws new light on the dramatic lives of George II and Queen Caroline: a lover murdered, babies snatched, horrific illnesses and tearful deathbed reconciliations.
Molotov’s Magic Lantern, by Rachel Polonsky
A writer explores a country and its culture in a luminous, original and unforgettable book.
In the 1990s Rachel Polonsky went to live in Moscow with her family, and began a journey of discovery into a country she thought she knew well. She lived in an apartment block on Romanov Street that had, in Tsarist and Soviet times, been a residence of the elite; and one of those ghostly neighbours was Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s henchman and arch survivor of that ferocious regime. (Marshal Budenny, hero of the civil war, and Marshal Konev, conqueror of Berlin, also lived there; Leon Trotsky was carried out of the building by the secret police when he was first sent into exile).
In Molotov’s former apartment, Rachel Polonsky discovered what remained of his library. And she learned that Molotov – ruthless apparatchik, joint author of the collectivisations and the Great Purge – was an ardent bibliophile, an eager reader with a particular devotion to Chekhov. He had all the classics; and he owned signed first editions of books by writers he later sent to the Gulag.
The library and the building in which Rachel Polonsky found it are at the heart of the book, the prism through which she looked at Russian history and at Russia as it is under Putin, and she kept returning to it in her journeys around Russia in search of the places associated with the writers in the library and with the politicians and soldiers who had lived in the Romanov house. At first she walked the streets around the Kremlin, writing about Moscow’s buildings and churches, its old bath houses and vanished aristocratic families, about Pushkin and the Decembrists, then widening her search to the towns and artists’ colonies in the region around the capital. Later she went from the far south to the high Arctic, from St Petersburg in the west to the border with Mongolia in the east.
In each place she encountered the past of a country ravaged by war, famine, genocide and totalitarianism, but also the legacy of Russia’s writers: their airy humanism, their tortured insights and nationalist fantasies, their epic responses to war and terror, their commitment to spiritual values and to natural science – a great and contradictory culture that continues to haunt the rest of the world.
Contested Will, by James Shapiro
From the bestselling and prize-winning author of 1599, an investigation of one of the most contentious issues in English history: who did write Shakespeare’s plays? And why does it matter so much to us?
For two hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, no one thought to argue that somebody else had written his plays. Since then dozens of rival candidates – including Sir Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford – have been proposed as their true author. Contested Will unravels the mystery of when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote the plays, among them such leading writers and artists as Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Orson Welles and Sir Derek Jacobi.
Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro’s fascinating search for the source of this controversy retraces a path strewn with fabricated documents, calls for trials, false claimants, concealed identity, bald-faced deception and a failure to grasp what could not be imagined. If Contested Will does not end the authorship question once and for all, it will nonetheless irrevocably change the nature of the debate by confronting what is really contested: are the plays and poems of Shakespeare autobiographical and, if so, do they hold the key to the question of who wrote them?
