Category: Historical Fiction

Top 5 Tuesday:Books set in Europe

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Top 5 Tuesday was created by Shanah at Bionic Book Worm, and it is now being hosted by Meeghan at Meeghan Reads. For details of all of the latest prompts for April to June, see Meeghan’s post here

We’re continuing reading around the world this month and today the topic is Europe. The books I’ve chosen are crime fiction and historical fiction.

France: When I think of French crime fiction Georges Simenon’s Maigret immediately pops into my mind.  Simenon was actually Belgian, not French, but the Maigret books are set in France (mainly in Paris). Simenon wrote 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Commissaire Jules Maigret and I first knew of them from a friend at school who loved the books. Then there were the numerous TV productions with Rupert Davies as Maigret and more recently Rowan Atkinson has played the role of Chief Inspector Maigret in the 2016 ITV series.

I’ve read several of the Maigret books. The Man on the Boulevard is the 41st book in the series. There were lots of things I liked in this book – the attention to detail, the descriptions of the weather (cold and wet), and the characters themselves.  It’s set in Paris and without knowing the location of the various boulevards I could still get a good impression of the city and its suburbs. 

It has a puzzling murder to solve – Louis Thouret is found stabbed in a little alleyway. Seemingly a perfectly ordinary man of regular habits who had left his home in the suburbs to go to his job as a storekeeper in Paris for the past twenty five years. It turns out that Louis had a double life that his wife knew nothing about. It appears he had been having an affair and for the past three years he had not had a job. I liked the theme of a man following a double life and the way Louis resolves his problem of keeping up appearances with his wife and family although I thought his method of maintaining his income was rather implausible.

Italy: A Sea of Troubles by Donna Leon, whose books are crime fiction, but also discuss various social and cultural issues and A Sea of Troubles, the 10th Commissario Guido Brunetti novel, is no exception. Brunetti is one of my favourite detectives. He is happily married with two children. He doesn’t smoke or drink to excess and often goes home for lunch to his beautiful wife Paolo, who is a wonderful cook – in this book she treats him to a delicious apple cake made with lemon and apple juice and ‘enough Grand Marnier to permeate the whole thing and linger on the tongue for ever.’ (page 238)

I read it eagerly, keen to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding the deaths of two clam fishermen, father and son, off the island of Pellestrina, south of the Lido on the Venetian lagoon, when their boat suddenly exploded. As well as the mystery the issues Leon highlights in this book are concerning pollution and the overfishing of clams that is destroying the clam beds.

Spain:  C J Sansom’s Winter in Madrid, which I think is one of the best books I’ve read, a book that had me in tears as I was reading about the devastation, desolation and waste of war. It is an action packed thrilling war/spy story and also a moving love story and historical drama all rolled into this tense and gripping novel. Sansom vividly conveys the horror and fear of the realities of life in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and the first two years of the Second World War.

The opening chapter dramatically sets the tone for the book with the brutality of the Battle of Jarama in 1937 then leaps straight into the bombing of London in 1940. Then Harry Brett, traumatised by his injuries at Dunkirk is sent to Spain to spy for the British Secret Service. He is plunged into the terrible living conditions in Madrid where people are starving, children are left homeless to fend for themselves and wild dogs roam the rubble of bombed houses.

Greece: Those Who Are Loved by Victoria Hislop, one of the most moving novels I’ve read. It is historical fiction ‘set against the backdrop of the German occupation of Greece, the subsequent civil war and a military dictatorship, all of which left deep scars’. It begins slowly and it was only at about the halfway stage that it really took off for me. But then, the book sprang to life, the pace increased, and I was totally gripped and moved as history and fiction came together dramatically in glorious technicolor, telling the story of the characters personal lives and their parts in the action.

The main character is Themis Koralis/Stravidis (in Greek mythology Themis is the personification of fairness and natural law). In 2016 she is a great grandmother and realising that her grandchildren knew very little about Greek history she decided to tell them her life story, beginning from when she was a small child in the 1930s, through the German occupation of Greece during the Second World War, the civil war that followed, then the oppressive rule of the military junta and the abolition of the Greek monarchy, up to the present day.

Iceland: The Mist by Ragnar Jonasson, the third novel in the Hidden Iceland series. Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdottir is worrying about her daughter, Dimma and her relationship with her husband, Jon. Alongside the story of what is happening in her personal life, she is also investigating the disappearance of a young woman and a suspected murder case, a particularly horrific one in an isolated farmhouse in the east, where Erla and her husband, Einar live. When a stranger, lost in a snowstorm arrives Erla invites him in and the nightmare begins.

I loved the setting, Jonasson’s writing bringing the scenery and the weather to life – you can feel the isolation and experience what it is like to be lost in a howling snowstorm. The emotional tension is brilliantly done too, the sense of despair, confusion and dread is almost unbearable. 

The 1952 Club

Published on by Margaret20 Comments

 Simon and Karen are holding the next bi-annual even from 21st to 27th April 2025, when we’ll be reading books from 1952! They are asking readers across the internet to join together to build up a picture of the year 1952 in books – you can read, share, review and comment on any book from the year in question; you can get involved as much or as little as you like. You could read one book or several; it’s low pressure and you have a wide choice of reading matter! There will be a dedicated page for the club where Karen will share links to other people’s posts and reviews.

I’ve previously read and reviewed read these books published in 1952:

Mrs McGinty’s Dead (Poirot and  Mrs Ariadne Oliver)

They Do It With Mirrors (Miss Marple)

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham

Murder in the Mill Race by E C R Lorac

The Man on a Donkey by H F M Prescott

I have other books published in 1952 to read in my TBRs, so I’ll read one or more of the following books:

Sword of Honour – the first book in the Men at Arms series by Evelyn Waugh

Five Have a Wonderful Time by Enid Blyton

The Singing Sands by Josephine Tey – this was the last of Josephine Tey’s Inspector Grant mysteries, published posthumously by Peter Davies Ltd in 1952

The Birds and other stories by Daphne du Maurier

Top 5 Tuesday:Books set in the Americas

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Top 5 Tuesday was created by Shanah at Bionic Book Worm, and it is now being hosted by Meeghan at Meeghan Reads. For details of all of the latest prompts for January to March, see Meeghan’s post here.

Today the topic is Books set in America – North or South, we’re doing the continents. Tell us about all your fave books set in the Americas.

I have too many books to choose from to say these are the top five books set in the Americas that I’ve read. And it’s so hard to decide which ones to feature, because I could pick five different books on another day. But in the end I decided to pick books from Canada, the USA and South America (Brazil and Chile) They are all books I’ve read and loved.

Canada:

A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson. It’s set in North Ontario in 1972, but looks back to events thirty years earlier when Elizabeth Orchard first met Liam who was then a small boy of 3 when he and his family lived in the house next door. The last time she saw him he was still only 4 years old. It was not a happy time for either of them, and thirty years later, when she is dying she wants to make amends and gives him her house.

Clara lives next door to Elizabeth, who she loves, and she is alarmed when she sees Liam moving into Elizabeth’s house. Elizabeth had given her a key and she goes in every day to feed Moses, Elizabeth’s cat. She has no idea that Elizabeth is dying and is furious when she discovers that Liam is moving Elizabeth’s things and packing them in boxes. Her life is in turmoil in any case as she is devastated that Rose, her 16 year old sister has gone missing.

The narration moves between these three people, seeing events through their eyes. Elizabeth, in hospital looks back over her life, remembering her despair at not having a child of her own, and her love for little Liam that ended badly, despite her good intentions. Clara spends the time before and after school at the window looking out for Rose’s return and Liam, whilst remembering his sad childhood, is trying to rebuild his life after his marriage ended in divorce.

I loved this book. It’s about families, the things that go wrong, about memories and about friendships and the care that people have for each other. It’s moving and sad, but also filled with hope. And it’s beautifully written.

North America:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, set in the Deep South of  America in the 1930s. It’s narrated by Scout (Jean Louise Finch) as she looks back as an adult to the Depression, the years when with her older brother, Jem, and their friend, Dill, she witnessed the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white girl. Scout’s father, Atticus, a lawyer defends Tom. It’s also the story of Boo Radley, their neighbour, a man who is never seen, who is said to only come out at night. 

Scout is a feisty character, always prepared to stand up for what she thinks is right, but Atticus, who also stands for justice and the moral and ethical ideal, has to reign her in sometimes. The book is full of strong characters and for me the outstanding scenes are those when Atticus sat reading outside the jail to stop the lynch mob attacking Tom and the trial itself at the court-house. 

The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Enter a vanished and unjust world: Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Where black maids raise white children, but aren’t trusted not to steal the silver…

There’s Aibileen, raising her seventeenth white child and nursing the hurt caused by her own son’s tragic death; Minny, whose cooking is nearly as sassy as her tongue; and white Miss Skeeter, home from college, who wants to know why her beloved maid has disappeared.

Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny. No one would believe they’d be friends; fewer still would tolerate it. But as each woman finds the courage to cross boundaries, they come to depend and rely upon one another. Each is in a search of a truth. And together they have an extraordinary story to tell…

South America:

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett. Among the tangled waterways and giant anacondas of the Brazilian Rio Negro, an enigmatic scientist is developing a drug that could alter the lives of women for ever. Dr Annick Swenson’s work is shrouded in mystery; she refuses to report on her progress, especially to her investors, whose patience is fast running out. Anders Eckman, a mild-mannered lab researcher, is sent to investigate.Dr. Annick Swenson, a research scientist, is developing a drug that could alter the lives of women forever.

A curt letter reporting his untimely death is all that returns. Now Marina Singh, Anders’ colleague and once a student of the mighty Dr Swenson, is their last hope. Compelled by the pleas of Anders’s wife, Marina leaves the snowy plains of Minnesota and retraces her friend’s steps into the heart of the South American darkness, determined to track down Dr. Swenson and uncover the secrets being jealously guarded among the remotest tribes of the rainforest.

The novel raises questions about the morality and ethics of research into the use of extreme fertility treatments and drug studies in general, along with the exploitation of native populations. It is wonderfully descriptive and I could easily imagine that I was there in the jungle, experiencing the oppressive heat and humidity. I found it all fascinating and I was totally absorbed in the story.

Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende, part of a trilogy, with The House of the Spirits and Daughter of Fortune. Aurora is the narrator and this is the story of her family and after giving details of her birth, Aurora goes back to 1862 beginning her story with details about her grandparents. There is a lot of detail, a lot of 19th century history of Chile, its mix of nationalities, politics and wars.

It’s a book about love, loss, identity, betrayal and about family relationships. It’s a portrayal of the strengths and weaknesses of the characters and their struggle to survive. Aurora tells her family’s story through looking at photographs, snapshots in time, through her own disjointed, incomplete and vague memories of her childhood and through conversations with her family members. Whilst she was still very young her two grandmothers decided her future, thinking that time would erase the memory of the traumatic events she had seen, never realising that the scenes would live forever in her nightmares.

Spell the Month in Books – April 2025

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months there are optional theme challenges, such as “books with an orange cover” or books of a particular genre, but for the most part, any book you want to use is fair game!

This option this month is Animal on the Cover or in the Title, which I found much easier to do than some of the previous options. These are all books I’ve read, apart from Inchworm.

A is for Animal Farm by George Orwell is an allegorical novella, of the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. It tells the story of a farm where the animals rebel against the farmer, Mr Jones, and throw him off the land. They hope to create a society where they are all equal, free and happy. Ultimately, the farm ends up in a state that is as bad, if not worse than it was before, under the dictatorship of a pig named Napoleon. It begins as the old boar Major tells the animals about his dream of overthrowing the human race when the produce of their labour would then be their own and he incites them to rebel. In the story that follows the Major is based on Marx, Farmer Jones on the Tsar, the pigs Napoleon and Snowball are based on Stalin and Trotsky respectively. Their revolution began by declaring that all animals are equal and ended with the added phrase but some animals are more equal than others.

P is for The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie. Neither Hercule Poirot, nor Miss Marple feature in this novel and Mrs Ariadne Oliver has only a small part. Detective Inspector Lejeune is in charge of the investigation into the murder of Father Gorman who was killed one night on his way home. A list of names is found on Father Gorman’s body, seemingly unconnected in any way. The title,  a reference from the Book of Revelation  to a pale horse ridden by Death suggested to me from the beginning that what they had in common was death.

The Pale Horse is an old house  which was formerly an inn in the village and is now the home of three weird women, thought by the locals to be witches. The Pale Horse is also the name of a sinister organisation that arranges murders based on black magic. It’s a fascinating book conveying a feeling of real menace.

R is for The Raven’s Head by Karen Maitland. Set in 1224 in France and England this is a dark book. I found parts of it very uncomfortable and disturbing to read and yet also very compelling. Life in the medieval world was cruel and brutal and The Raven’s Head describes that world in minute detail, evoking the superstitious fear of the period.

The story is told from the three main characters point of view – Vincent, Wilky, a young boy taken from his family to live in a monastery in Norfolk where unspeakable terrors await him and the other young boys, and Gisa also living in Norfolk, working in her uncle’s apothecary’s shop. Their lives are connected through Lord Sylvain who is trying to find a way to bring the dead back to life and the abbot, trying to find the elixir of life – both experimenting with alchemy.

I is for Inchworm by Ann Kelly. Gussie is a twelve year old girl from St. Ives in Cornwall. She is passionate about learning, wildlife, poetry, literature, and she wants to be a photographer when she grows up. But her dreams were put on hold as she struggled with a serious heart condition. Now she has got what she needed: a heart and lung transplant. But it isn’t working out quite the way she thought. Firstly she has to leave her beloved Cornwall to live in London and in the months following her operation she is unable to do very much except read and adopt a stray kitten, but she could do that when she was sick. She craves adventure and experience beyond her four walls, until, that is, she hits upon a plan – she is going to get her divorced parents to fall in love again. It’s not going to be easy, her mum is still dating her doctor boyfriend and despises Gussie’s father, who happens to be living with his new girlfriend – the Snow Queen. But Gussie is a determined girl and there is only one thing that could stop her now.

L is for Lion by Conn Iggluden. This is the first book in Conn Iggulden’s Golden Age series set in Amcient Greece in the 5th century BCE. I thoroughly enjoyed it which surprised me as generally speaking I’m not keen on reading battle scenes and the book starts and ends with battles. But I had no problem with following the action of the battles between the Greeks and the Persians, and was able to visualise what was going on without any difficulty. The characters’ names took me a little while to get clear in my mind but I soon got used to them. The two main characters are both young men, Cimon the older of the two has more authority than Pericles, the younger man. Lion is the story of their early careers.

The next link up will be on May 3, 2025 when the theme will be: Freebie

My Beautiful Imperial by Rhiannon Lewis

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

I’m cutting this fine as today is the last day of the Reading Wales Month 2025 hosted by Karen at BookerTalk.  Yesterday I posted my review of Resistance by Owen Sheers. I’ve also read My Beautiful Imperial by Rhiannon Lewis, a book that was a Mother’s Day present from my son, a few years ago. It was her debut novel and was listed by the Walter Scott Prize Academy as one of its 20 recommended historical novels of 2018. Originally from Cardigan, she now lives near Abergavenny. This short post really does not do justice to this beautiful book. I can only say that to realise how excellent it is, is to read it for yourself!

Victorina Press| 2017|395 pages| e-book |5*


I loved My Beautiful Imperial. It’s historical fiction set in the 19th century in both Wales and Chile. It begins in Wales in March 1865 with Davy Davies, a young teenager who is at the age when he must decide whether to work at the mill or to be a sailor like father, the captain of the Ellen of Cardigan. Life at home for him changed for ever after his young sister, Elen, was killed when their barn caught fire and his mother wrongly blames him for Elen’s death, and so he leaves home and he sets sail on the Royal Dane. As time went by he worked his way up the ranks until he became Captain of the Imperial, a steamship transporting mail and cargo up and down the Chilean coast. Then in 1891 his life changed when civil war broke out in Chile and his ship was commandeered by the government under President Balmaceda, to carry arms and transport troops.

It captured my imagination completely. I was caught up in this story of friendship, love, war and the dangers of life at sea and during the civil war in Chile history. It’s well written, so much so, that I didn’t want to put the book down. What makes it even more enjoyable is that Davy’s story is based on the actual events of the Civil War in Chile and the experiences of the author’s ancestor, Captain David Jefferson Davies. Rhiannon Lewis spent twenty years researching his life beginning with a book of etchings and an old photograph album. She discovered new evidence and has tried to make her book as historically accurate as possible, stating in her Author’s Note that it is ‘ultimately a novel and a work of fiction.’

Resistance by Owen Sheers

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

I decided to read Resistance by Owen Sheers for the Reading Wales Month 2025 hosted by Karen at BookerTalk. It’s another one of my TBRs, a paperback that I bought in 2008. It was first published in 2007 by Faber and Faber (349 pages). Resistance was his first novel.

Owen Sheers was brought up in Abergavenny. The winner of an Eric Gregory Award and the 1999 Vogue Young Writer’s Award, his first collection of poetry, The Blue Book, was shortlisted for the Welsh Book of the Year.

From Owen Sheer’s website:

1944. After the fall of Russia and the failed D-Day landings, a German counter-attack lands on British soil. Within a month, half of Britain is occupied.

Sarah Lewis, a 26-year-old farmer’s wife, wakes to find her husband Tom has disappeared. She is not alone. All the other women in the isolated Welsh border valley of Olchon also wake to find their husbands gone. With this sudden and unexplained absence the women regroup as an isolated, all-female community and wait, hoping for news.

A German patrol arrives in the valley, the purpose of their mission a mystery. When a severe winter forces the two groups into co-operation, a fragile mutual dependency develops. Sarah begins a faltering acquaintance with the patrol’s commanding officer, Albrecht Wolfram. But as the pressure of the war beyond presses in on them, the valley’s delicate state of harmony is increasingly threatened, before being broken completely, with devastating consequences.

Imbued with immense imaginative breadth and confidence, Owen Sheers’ debut novel unfolds with the pace and intensity of a thriller. A hymn to the glorious landscape of the border territories and a gripping portrait of a community under siege, Resistance is a first novel of considerable grace and power.

My thoughts:

I love historical fiction, but this is different – it is alternate history. Sheers speculates upon how the course of history might have been altered if Germany had won the Second World War and invaded and occupied Great Britain, an alarming prospect. The plot centres on the inhabitants of the isolated Olchon valley in the Black Mountains of south-east Wales close to Hereford and the border between Wales and England.  It’s set in 1944–45, shortly after the failure of Operation Overlord and a successful German counter-invasion of Great Britain.  

I enjoyed it mainly for Sheers’ beautiful descriptions of the Welsh countryside, so vivid that I can easily imagine I was there, and the daily tasks of farming life, but this does make it slow reading. The main characters are Sarah, and the other women, Maggie, Mary, Menna and Bethan, living in the valley whose husbands had left, Albrecht, an English speaker and ex-Oxford scholar, who leads a German patrol ordered to establish an observation post in the valley, and George, a teenager, recruited by ‘Tommy Atkins’, a British Intelligence officer, to join the British Resistance movement observing the enemy troop movements.

This is a very visual book, and character driven with very little action until the second half of the book. After reading so much crime fiction and fast action novels I had to adapt my reading speed to appreciate this book and to fully enjoy it. It’s a book to read slowly absorbing the language and descriptions. I particularly liked the details about the Welsh poet, who told Sarah of the tales of King Arthur, Lancelot and Percival (knights of the Round Table) and about Welsh princes, Irish princesses and English armies. One of the stories was about a Welsh king and his army, beaten in the hills by Edward I. Beaten but not killed and not captured and never seen again.

Thousands of men swallowed within the muscles of the earth that formed Wales’ natural defences against her invaders. And they were still there. At this point the poet paused in his painting, placed his brush into a cloudy jar of water and leant closer to Sarah’s listening face. His voice dropped, so quiet she could barely hear him over the running of the streams. Yes, he’d whispered, still there in the hills, deep inside them, buried under the peat, heather, gorse, rowan, bog-cotton, stone and soil. Asleep. Not dead, asleep. An entire army and their king, ready to wake and defend the country in its hour of need. (pages 176 and 177)

Sarah wonders if that’s where their husbands have gone deep underground. She wanted to believe that it was so, that their husbands would be coming back to defend their country. This is a story I’ve come across before, but in England, a legend of a cavern beneath Alderley Edge in Cheshire, full of knights in armour awaiting a call to decide the fate of a great battle for England. There is no king named, but there is a wizard involved, who is referred to as Merlin in later versions of the legend.

Another part that struck a chord with me is when Albrecht took Sarah up into the hills, luring her through a crack in the rock in the cliff wall to a large cavity, where the Mappa Mundi was kept hidden from the SS. It’s a medieval map of the world – I’ve seen it in Hereford Cathedral. Scholars believe it was made around the year 1300 and shows the history, geography and destiny of humanity as it was understood in Christian Europe in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In his Afterword Owen Sheers states that the Mapp Mundi was removed from Hereford Cathedral and eventually kept in a coal mine in Bradford-upon-Avon.

There is much more in this book that I’ve not described – the relationship between the women and the Germans, particularly that between Sarah and Albrecht, who eventually realised what they had in common, a love of music and literature. I haven’t described how the wider community reacted to the invasion, and the suspicion and fear that they all experienced. And, having said that there is very little action in this book there is plenty of detail and thoughts about war, occupation, death and above all about Wales. The ending is particularly poignant.

Owen Sheers’ Afterwood explains where he got the idea to write an alternative history. He had first heard of the plans for a British resistance organisation when he was working for a builder in the Llanthony valley and the builder told him how during the war some farmers in the area were given caches of arms which they’d hidden in underground bunkers in the hills. Should the orders come they were to leave their homes and wives and take to the Black Mountains to resist the German army. Later on, in 2001 he heard a radio interview on the Today programme with George Vater, who had, as a young man, been recruited into the Auxiliary Units Special Duties Section comprising local people trained to spy on an occupying German force. Sheers knew George Vater and visiting him, George had shown him cuttings, maps and photographs and told how he had been approached by a man calling himself ‘Tommy Atkins’ who invited to join his Special Duties Section. So, whilst this is a work of fiction it is based on fact, woven into Sheers’ story and he writes that only the valley is real.

I enjoyed it far more than I expected and I’d love to read more of Owen Sheers’ work.