LATEST TITLES

TIDELANDS

by Philippa Gregory, Simon & Schuster, £20 (ebook £9.99). Available August 20 ★★★★★ ON the very edge of a country at war with its own king, on an island which changes shape with the tide, midwife Alinor awaits news of her vanished husband. Instead she meets Thomas, a handsome Catholic royalist, and risks her own safety to protect him.

So begins a spate of good luck for our protagonist that attracts the jealousy and whispers of her neighbours at a time when a single woman cannot afford to be the subject of gossip.

Philippa Gregory returns with an English Civil War novel that excels in everything she does best. Historical events are written with breathless immediacy, keeping the reader enthralled.

She pays close attention to the plight of women in the past, so often unchanged despite men’s wars, and gives them a voice. And of course, there is a healthy dose of bodice-ripping romance.

INLAND

by Tea Obrecht, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.99 (ebook £7.99) ★★★★★ EIGHT years after her debut novel The Tiger’s Wife was published to critical acclaim, Serbian American author Tea

Obreht returns with Inland, a magical realist examination of frontier living and the creation of the myth of the American West.

Following the twin narratives of youthful outlaw Lurie Mattie’s escape westwards and acceptance by the Camel Corps, and frontierswoman Nora Lark’s hardscrabble existence in her homestead, carved out of the Arizona Territory in 1893, Inland is shot through with the supernatural.

The dead re-appear among the living, mysterious disappearances abound, and the eerie, bewitching landscape becomes a character in itself.