A very unhappy band of brothers
FOOLS AND MORTALS by Bernard Cornwell (HarperCollins £20)
THE Shakespeare brothers don’t get on. Will, the older sibling, is making his way as a playwright, but Richard, an actor, is resentful that Will does not help his career.
Based north of the Thames, their company is fighting off competition from rivals as well as the Puritan threat to ban theatres. To add to the tensions, the players are racing to put on A Midsummer Night’s Dream at an aristocratic wedding, Will is struggling to finish his new work about ‘star-crossed lovers’ and someone is trying to steal the valuable manuscripts.
Story and characters crackle off the page (watch for the humane Brother Lawrence) as do the stink and violence of Elizabethan London. The author of the Sharpe and Last Kingdom bestsellers has pulled off a surprise for his readers — and a terrific one at that.
THIRTY-ONE KINGS by Robert J. Harris (Polygon £12.99)
IT IS June 1940. The veteran soldier and adventurer Richard Hannay, hero of John Buchan’s Thirty-Nine Steps, is called back to action.
Tasked with finding a missing agent, ‘Roland’, who holds the key to the Thirty-One Kings, the codename for those people who will be vital to the resistance, Hannay must reach Paris before the enemy.
Accompanied by the DieHards, a band of tough, resourceful Glaswegians, he heads for the French capital only to find that the Nazis are already rolling in.
This is very good fun. The plot whips along, embellished by dogfights, perilous car journeys, personal vendettas and plenty of derring-do — plus a whiff of enjoyable parody to lend an edge. I was beguiled.
THE SILENT COMPANIONS by Laura Purcell (Raven Books £12.99)
IN 1866, the recently widowed and pregnant Elsie Bainbridge retires to The Bridge, the family ancestral home which is now almost derelict.
Puzzled by the neglect, Elsie prepares to wait out her pregnancy only to discover the house appears to be haunted and there are terrifying wooden cut-out figures moving of their own volition from room to room — one of which bears a resemblance to her.
The novel opens with Elsie confined to a mental asylum. Accused of murder, she has lost the power of speech and is being coaxed to talk by a doctor more enlightened than his colleagues. Will she?
Layering on the dark and creepy, this intriguingly plotted novel is the fullblown gothic, maintaining throughout an unsettling claustrophobic atmosphere mixed with some unusual historical detail.