HISTORICAL FICTION
THE IRON NECKLACE
by Giles Waterfield
(Allen & Unwin £12.99)
JUST before the outbreak of World War I, Irene Benson, an English artist with ambitions, marries Thomas Curtius, a German architect, and moves to Berlin and a comfortable upper-middle class existence. Meanwhile, her brother Mark joins the diplomatic service and her fiery younger sister Sophie is left to chafe against her stifling existence. Interspersed with their stories is that of Irene’s granddaughter as she tries to piece together what happened to her relations and why the family scattered.
The tensions and fractures of a domestic war front have a power and poignancy of their own, and if you crave bangs and battles this is not the novel for you. Rather, the author chooses to focus on the bewilderment of civilians who have no idea what is going to happen next and quietly probes the intimacies of private lives blighted by ‘warfare, politics, hatreds’ on both sides of the divide.
SOPHIE AND THE SIBYL
by Patricia Duncker
(Bloomsbury £16.99)
WHEN the scandalously unmarried Marion Lewis (aka the novelist George Eliot) takes a liking to Max Duncker, his older brother sees it as an opportunity to steer Max away from a life of excess and to put the Duncker publishing business on a firm footing.
Known as the Sibyl, George Eliot may be barred from every respectable home on account of her living arrangements but, ironically, she has been read in most of them and Max finds himself as fascinated by her as he is by his fiancee, the beautiful Sophie von Hahn.
Like Ali Smith in How To Be Both, the author has no respect for the novel’s traditional boundaries. Seizing the big ideas and tussles of the 19th-century novel by the scruff of the neck, she shakes them up to produce a fizzing ‘neo-Victiorian’ novel. Witty and brave, it is one to get the teeth into.
AMY SNOW
by Tracy Rees
(Quercus £7.99)
WINNER of the Richard and Judy bestseller competition, this novel comes garnished with expectations. A precious only child, eight-year- old Aurelia Vennaway stumbles on an abandoned baby girl in the snow and insists on bringing her back to live at Hatville Court, despite the hostility of her snobbish parents.
Years later, after Aurelia’s premature death, Amy is forced out into the world by the uncharitable Vennaways. But they are unaware that the clever Aurelia has outwitted them and planned a treasure hunt for Amy which she hopes will leave the girl wiser and richer.
Deploying a good many Victorian tropes — coded messages and a scandalous secret among them — the author’s light-hearted enjoyment of her story is sufficiently infectious to overcome some thin characterisation and a plot which could have been balanced a little more carefully.