HISTORICAL
NUCLEUS by Rory Clements (Zaffre £12.99)
THE second in the series featuring the American Cambridge professor Tom Wilde opens in June 1939.
In Germany, physicists are surging ahead with their work on building an atomic device.
In the Cambridge Cavendish laboratory, where the atom was split in 1932, British and U.s. scientists are painfully aware that the nuclear race is on and the German High Command wants their secrets.
The situation becomes even murkier when a Cavendish scientist is murdered and a small boy is snatched from a kindertransport train. Are the two connected? struggling to unpick the puzzle, Tom Wilde and the British secret service face dramatic consequences if they fail.
rory Clements evokes the nervous, reckless build-up to the outbreak of war in a convincingly detailed thriller.
IN LOVE AND WAR by Liz Trenow
(Pan £7.99) World War I left swathes of Flanders and the somme in a state of devastation.
Body parts, ordnance and the ruins of building and vegetation had been churned into an unspeakable mix.
nevertheless, battlefield tourist operations were quickly launched, inciting distaste and outrage on both the Allied and German sides.
However, the three women — english ruby, American Alice, and German Martha — who join such a tour are beyond such scruples.
They are there to discover what happened to the men they have lost. If their individual grief is not healed, their journey results in surprising alliances and new ways of thinking.
The aftermath of war can be ferocious. This gentle and thoughtful story concentrates on the positives, without ignoring the destruction and pain of an epic conflict.
BEAUTIFUL STAR by Andrew Swanston
(Dome Press £8.99) In 1875, five fishing boats — among them the Beautiful star — set out from Fifeshire and headed south into bad weather.
In 1002, eilmer, a monk obsessed with flying, launched himself off a building in Malmesbury. And in 1708, daniel Jones was press-ganged in Falmouth on HMs Association, where he soon realised the navigation was being fatally miscalculated.
These, and the subjects of the other four stories — including the part played by the Button seller at Waterloo and lady Mary Bankes’s gallant defence of Corfe Castle during the Civil War — have been worked up from real events, but their characters were not mentioned in the documents, or only featured in a footnote.
narrated in unflashy prose, intriguing and occasionally eyeopening, these quietly revisionist stories are a pleasure to read.