HISTORICAL

KINGMAKER: KINGDOM COME by Toby Clements (Century £20)

AFTER only a couple of pages I was completely hooked and helplessly gripped by this fourth volume in the Kingmaker series, which opens in 1470. Thomas and Katherine Everingham are living at Marton Hall in Lincolnshire, trying to escape a past which dogs them.

The Yorkist King, Edward IV, has clashed with the Kingmaker Warwick, and the country is once again in the throes of violent and bloody upheaval. The Everinghams hide game-changing secrets about the Yorkists, which puts them in danger.

The suffering and the brutalities of medieval life are beautifully and viscerally conveyed.

FOOLS AND MORTALS by Bernard Cornwell (Harper Collins £20) THE up-and-coming playwright Will Shakespeare is refusing to help his actor brother Richard further his ambitions, and there is bad blood between them.

Skulduggery, manuscript thefts, violent rivalries and the threat of the Puritans, who plot to close down theatre-land, all add to the problems of mounting a production.

Out of this emerges a taut story of sibling tension and theatrical drama. Plot and characters crackle off the page, as do the stink and danger of Elizabethan London.

SALT CREEK by Lucy Treloar

(Aardvark Bureau £9.99) THIS debut tells the story of the failure of a colonial experiment in Australia, seen through the eyes of teenage Hester.

After several poor investments, Stanton Finch removes his family in 1855 from the comforts of Adelaide to the inhospitable Coorong in South Australia. They are dirt-poor, the land is difficult to farm and his wife declines into depression.

The badly treated Aborigines prey on Stanton’s conscience, so he takes in and educates a local boy, Tully — a decision that will change everything.

Powerful and unflinching, it is so beautifully written that the heart sings.