HISTORICAL FICTION
THE ESSEX SERPENT by Sarah Perry (Serpent’s Tail £14.99)
WIDOWED and wealthy, Cora Seaborne has moved from Victorian London to the essex village of Aldwinter where she can indulge her passions for palaeontology and the natural world.
Freed from a controlling husband and ‘the obligation to be beautiful’, she can give full reign to her strong, questing intelligence.
Her developing relationship with the local vicar, william Ransome, becomes part of this new and welcome existence — until it threatens to become deeper.
The love affair is not straightforward and forms only one strand in a richly themed and exhilarating novel.
In Aldwinter, the locals are terrified that an ancient mythical serpent has been shaken awake by a recent earthquake and is claiming lives. Against this background, Perry’s poetically written story dramatises the clash between rationality and resurgent superstition, between desire, morality and the intellect, and the struggle of reformers to redress the poverty of late-Victorian society.
SLEEPER’S CASTLE by Barbara Erskine (HarperCollins £14.99)
In 1400, welsh nationalism coalesced around the figure of owen Glendower. The welsh Revolt was gathering strength and the english king, Henry IV, was forced to act.
The gifted poet Catrin is living with her repressive father at Sleeper’s Castle on the welsh border and finds herself ensnared in the resulting violent upheavals.
Switch to the present day where Andy, a book illustrator, has fled to the castle from London to recover from the death of her partner. But instead of finding the peace and healing she craves, she finds herself sucked into the danger and turbulence of that earlier momentous time.
The best time-slip novels conjure powerful and convincing parallels between eras.
Thirty years ago, Barbara erskine’s Lady of Hay was published and took the bestseller lists by storm. Sleeper’s Castle demonstrates once again how skilled she is at conveying a rich sense of period and drawing us into those all-important connections.
THE GIRL IN THE GLASS TOWER by Elizabeth Fremantle (Michael Joseph £14.99)
In THe age of female powerlessness, women saints were notable for starving themselves — possibly in a bid to achieve some measure of control. This idea hovers in the background of Fremantle’s poignant and, in places, searing portrait of Arbella Stuart, whose close Tudor connections meant she could have been the successor to the childless elizabeth I.
As a result, Arbella’s liberty was more circumscribed than most, and her clandestine marriage to william Seymour, sixth in line to the throne, drew the wrath of James I who threw her into prison, where she died from self-inflicted starvation.
Her life and death were pitiful but, as the author deftly reveals Arbella’s interior life through her own eyes and those of her friend and poet Aemilia Lanyer, a stubborn, courageous spirit rises from the pages.
Filled with dense, dark political and social intrigue, this is five-star historical fiction.