A Net For Small Fishes
Lucy Jago Bloomsbury, £16.99
It’s January 1609 and Anne Turner, with an eye for fashion and a keen sense of her own worth, is about to make a friend who will open the doors to James I’s greedy, vain, lascivious Jacobean Court.
With a patent for making ruffs, Anne is anxious for acclaim and money when she is summoned by the cool, calculating Countess of Suffolk who wants her daughter Frances’s image to reflect her aristocratic status.
The 17-year-old countess is very unhappily married to the cruel, impotent and puritanical Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who has taken to whipping his wife in the face of his own inadequacies.
Anne, anxious to make an impression, binds Frankie’s wounds and transforms the weeping girl into a goddess, her dresses as formidable, beautiful and glittering as armour.
It is the start of a fateful friendship between two women “who are brave beyond caution” and whose attempt to survive in the precarious world of the court will lead to accusations of being bawds and poisoners.
It’s based on the Overbury scandal, with the women accused of murdering Sir Thomas Overbury in the Tower of London, and this sumptuous debut tells the story from Anne’s perspective.
And what a tale it is! Rich in intrigue and incident, it includes bad marriages, adulterous love affairs, backstabbing betrayals and vividly drawn characters – disreputable brothers, a necromancer who looks like a lemur, and the golden-haired Robert Carr, whom Frankie falls in love with.
A Net For Small Fishes is wonderfully dramatic and movingly tragic. With a wealth of detail on every atmospheric page, as the charismatic, flawed figures of Anne and Frankie try to live and love in the “cesspit” of a royal court, this is historical fiction at its immersive, intriguing best.
Hunter And The Dog Star Texan star Brickell defies categorisation, moving effortlessly between musical styles. Don’t Get In The Bed Dirty is funky and playful, My Power is like a rockier Joni Mitchell. It’s a beguiling mix of beautiful vocals, smart lyrics and strong tunes. Part-country, part-folk, part-pop and all good.