HISTORICAL

OLD BAGGAGE by Lissa Evans (Doubleday £14.99)

Are Matilda Simpkin’s best days behind her? Young and militant during the Women’s Suffrage Campaign, her middle age feels dull and constrained and she is casting around for a cause.

When her handbag is snatched on Hampstead Heath, it sets in train events that suggest a new lease of life.

Lissa evans’s gift for comedy edged with satire and pathos is God-given. Her main character — a free-spirited, clever, energetic, indelibly english spinster — would be tempting to caricature, but therein lies the author’s skill in refusing to do so.

There are many laughs to be had in this novel, but they are deeply affectionate and compassionate. Mattie’s search for meaning and purpose, which hints at the darker undercurrents of people marginalised by their sex and era, will strike a chord with most.

THE POISON BED by E.C. Fremantle

(Michael Joseph £12.99) WAS Thomas Overbury poisoned in 1613 by beautiful and determined Frances Carr and her second husband, robert? A cause celebre still debated by historians, the mystery is doubly complicated as, on being arrested, Frances confessed, but robert did not.

Both had their motives. Married to the earl of essex at 14, Frances wanted her marriage annulled because she was passionately in love with Carr, the king’s favourite.

Meanwhile, robert’s inseparable friend and confidant Overbury did not want him to marry a woman whom he regarded as scandalous and who would undoubtedly block his influence on the king.

Immaculately detailed and atmospheric, this Jacobean mystery borrows from both the revenge tragedies and contemporary noir thriller to manipulate the reader. It is dark, clever and compulsive.

LOVE AND RUIN by Paula McLain

(Fleet £14.99) ernest Hemingway boozed his way through a career that produced such classics as A Farewell To Arms, but his literary output took its toll. McLain’s previous novel, The Paris Wife, centred on Hemingway’s first marriage, to Hadley richardson.

This one dramatises his third, to Martha Gellhorn, a notable war correspondent who achieved many firsts in her career. Fiery, independent and outspoken as she was, her relationship with Hemingway was spiked with fierce emotion, including jealousy.

Bio-fiction is tricky and, whereas the novel about the less well-known Hadley gave breathing space, this one is hamstrung by what we know about Martha.

But it is beautifully written and, if you want to get a sense of this extraordinary woman, then it is a perfect introduction.