Published by Arrow Books / Random House, 1991, 318 pages. Rome, AD 71. Marcus Didius Falco, a private investigator who sometimes works for the Emperor Vespasian, is in jail, mostly because he has earned the enmity of the Chief Spy Anacrites. Falco had been sent to Campania by the emperor to clear up Anacrites’s mess, …
Category: Historical fiction
Perestroika—An Eye for an Eye, A Tooth for a Tooth: João Cerqueira
Translated from Portuguese by Garry Craig PowellPublished by 8th House Publishing, 2024, 394 pages. Original version published in 2024. This is the portrait of a dictatorship and its aftermath, told through the lives of ordinary people as well as those in power. Set in a fictional Eastern European country called Slavia, the first part of …
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Equator: Miguel Sousa Tavares
Translated from Portuguese by Peter BushPublished by Bloomsbury Press, 2008, 396 pages. Original version published in 2003. It is a rainy morning in December 1905, and Luís Bernardo Valença is on a train from Lisbon to Vila Viçosa: he has been summoned by the King of Portugal. He has no idea why the King wants …
A Killer in Winter: Susanna Gregory
Published by Time Warner Books / Sphere, 2003, 488 pages. Cambridge, 1354. “The winter that gripped England was the worst anyone could remember. It came early, brought by bitter north winds that were laden with snow and sleet. The River Cam and the King’s Ditch—usually meandering, fetid cesspools that oozed around the little Fen-edge town …
Ladies’ Tailor: Priya Hajela
Published by Harper Collins, 2022, 295 pages. “The people, the smells, the voices, the yearning, the hands clutching bellies—for that’s where their few precious belongings were—the odour of fear, the taste of dislocation, the sounds of desperation: that is what Gurdev sensed all around him when they reached Lahore station.” In 1947, when India was …
Murder in Old Bombay: Nev March
Published by Harper Collins / Minotaur Books, 2021, 383 pages. Bombay, 1892. Bacha and Pilloo, two young women, fall to their deaths from the city’s clocktower. The police conclude that it was suicide. Captain James Agnihotri of the British army is recovering in hospital in Bombay after a skirmish in Karachi with the Pathans, a …
Great Circle: Maggie Shipstead
Published by DoubleDay / Knopf, 2021, 593 pages. “I was born to be a wanderer. I was shaped to the earth like a seabird to a wave.” In 1950, aviator Marian Graves undertook a round-the-world flight, going from north to south. She disappeared over Antarctica—neither her body nor the plane was ever found. Over half …
Doña Inés Versus Oblivion: Ana Teresa Torres
Translated from Spanish by Gregory RabassaPublished by Phoenix, 1999, 245 pages. Original version published in 1992. “[L]isten carefully, because I hold its whole history in the secret places of my memory.” Doña Inés, the matriarch of a wealthy Venezuelan family who owns a cacao plantation, fights a legal battle with her houseboy for some property …
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The Forgotten Promise: Paula Greenlees
Published by Penguin, 2022, 512 pages. Two girls grow up together in 1920s British Malaya: Ella, the daughter of the English owner of a tin mine and his Malayan wife, and Noor, the daughter of the family’s cook. The girls are inseparable, even though Ella’s mother does not seem to approve. The girls swear a …
The Marriage Portrait: Maggie O’Farrell
Review by Susan T. LandryPublished by Knopf / Headline Publishing Group, 2022, 448 pages. I can't remember the exact circumstances that led me to plunge into Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet two years ago. I am a reasonably omnivorous reader, but rarely choose historical fiction when looking for a new book to get lost in. Not sure …
