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If you love historical fiction, please JOIN the society today. You won't be sorry. 'I've just read Solander - it's a triumph!' - Bernard Cornwell. |
Editors' Choice Titles for November 2005: [View complete Table of Contents]
THE DEATH OF
ACHILLES
THE OLD
BUZZARD HAD IT COMING
THE MARCH
THE CONSTANT PRINCESS
THE WIDOW OF THE SOUTH
IN LUCIA’S EYES
JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS
INDISCRETION
THIS THING OF
DARKNESS (US Title: TO THE EDGE OF THE WORLD)
THE
CRAZYLADIES OF PEARL STREET
UP FROM ORCHARD STREET |
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Those
of you who have read any of the other three novels by Boris Akunin
already available in English will need no encouragement to read this
latest work to be translated from Russian. Yes, Erast Fandorin is
back, more like James Bond than ever, complete with the Japanese
manservant with whom he practises martial arts in his hotel bedroom.
But of course Fandorin is also a master sleuth, Bond with the
deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes. This time he is back in Moscow
in 1879 investigating the sudden death of the military hero, General
Sobolev.
Mystery
readers everywhere, rejoice! This first of the Alafair Tucker
mysteries introduces an engaging new heroine to treasure. Set during
the cold winter of 1912 on the Oklahoma frontier, Alafair Tucker is a
farm wife and mother of nine. She determines to discover the murderer
of an abusive neighbor, even when the clues point to his eldest son,
whom Alafair’s daughter Phoebe loves and who is hiding in one of the
family’s outbuildings. 
The
March unfolds in sporadic episodes in the
same manner as this historic military maneuver wended its way through
Georgia and the Carolinas at the end of the War Between the States. As
inhuman as the bare facts are when taken at face value, we learn
enough about General William Tecumseh Sherman and his personal demons
to understand, sympathize with, and admire him as both man and
general. As the march progresses, we meet soldiers of both armies,
including a pair of Confederate misfits who conveniently wear
either uniform. Among the stragglers and followers are women who have
lost husbands, sons, homes, their purpose in life. We meet Mattie
Jameson,
a widow, seeking her two sons taken as adolescents into the
Confederate army; Emily Thompson, daughter of a Southern judge, who
has a brief involvement with Colonel Sartorious, an outstanding Union
Army surgeon; and Pearl, a beautiful half-white, freed slave on the
brink of womanhood and searching for her destiny.
From
infancy, Catalina, Infanta of Spain, daughter of Ferdinand and
Isabella, has been groomed to be the Queen of England. She travels to
England as a young girl, torn out of her familiar surroundings, not
speaking English, and thrust into a world she cannot fathom. Yet she
has the presence of mind, the rearing and the maturity to cope with
everything and anything that is thrown at her. She never forgets that
she is to be Queen of England someday. That is her one and only goal.
It is by the strength of her character, her resilience and her talent
that she discovers a way to make that goal a reality.
The facts are well known, but the way that Gregory tells the
story is a wonder. The transformation from the young Catalina to the
mature Katherine of Aragon, dryly recounted in our history books,
comes to life in Gregory’s talented hands. Moving between third-party
narrative and personal revelations by Catalina, we are made privy to
the Infanta’s tortured introduction into English life, her love affair
with her once-despised husband, Arthur, her widowhood, and her
machinations leading her to the throne of England by marriage to the
feisty, immature Henry, Arthur’s brother.
"The
widow of the South" is Carrie McGavock, the wife of a Tennessee
plantation owner who, in 1864, finds her house commandeered as a field
hospital by Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. After the
Battle of Franklin, wounded men cram every square foot of Carnton’s
stately rooms. Numbed by the deaths of three children and her
emotional separation from her husband, Carrie discovers purpose in
caring for the remains of a decimated army. Time spent with one of the
injured men, Arkansas sergeant Zachariah Cashwell, helps her heal
wounds from her past, and she goes on to arrange the interment of
almost 1,500 soldiers on her property.
In
Amsterdam, 1758, a masked courtesan captures the attention of Monsieur
le Chevalier de Seingalt – who will later come to be known as
Casanova. In the hope of becoming Galathee de Pompignac’s lover,
Seingalt makes a wager with her that she will be unable to find a
single woman whose heart he has broken.
r Japin has taken a brief reference to Lucia in Casanova’s
memoirs and expanded it into a tale of tragedy and heartbreak. The
resulting novel is a delightful portrait of 18th century Amsterdam and
a study of enduring love. The author deserves the many plaudits and
prizes lavished on his work in Europe. Congratulations must also go
to David Colmer who seamlessly translated the novel into English from
the original Dutch. His is a triumphant achievement that avoids the
stiffness and lack of sensitivity that has ruined many a translation
before now. In Lucia’s Eyes is a literary work that should
appeal to the romantic in us all.
The
plot of this book is familiar, a more or less chronological rendering
of a portion of Genesis. Thomas Mann’s hefty tome is not just the
story of Joseph and his brothers (the favored son with the coat of
many colors sold into slavery in Egypt by jealous siblings), but also
the story of Joseph's father, Jacob. We read of Jacob stealing his
brother Esau’s birthright and then fleeing to his Uncle Laban’s home,
where the well-known saga of Leah and Rachel unfolds. The book does
not truly become Joseph’s until he arrives in Egypt and begins his
rise and eventual fall because of Potiphar’s lovesick wife. Then
Joseph the dream interpreter, favored by God, rises again to become
Pharaoh’s right-hand man, saving the Egyptians from famine. His
starving brothers come to buy food. After toying with them a bit,
Joseph reveals himself to them, explaining how it was all part of
God’s plan. Of course, the Bible fleshes out this brief summary, but
the Bible leaves a lot open to speculation, particularly any
psychological insights into the motivation of the main actors. 
You
might think that to call your heroine Miss Fortune would handicap her,
but Caroline Fortune is too strong a character for that. When her
eccentric father loses all his money gambling, Caroline is forced to
seek employment. She becomes companion to a positive gorgon of a rich
old lady and is immediately embroiled in her employer’s feud with her
niece and nephew. Caroline enjoys Brighton society, as much as Mrs
Catling allows her to, and there meets an attractive man who does not,
as she supposes, wish to offer her honourable love, but to make her
his mistress. She keeps the humiliating proposition to herself. Even
when she leaves Mrs Catling and finds a welcome in the home of a long
lost aunt, she keeps her own counsel. Caroline soon makes friends and
is accepted in this new milieu, but to her horror she finds her
ungallant suitor from Brighton is the fiancé of her new best friend.
which puts her in a dilemma. How she copes with this difficult
situation and finally finds someone she can truly love ends this
stylishly written, engaging story. 
In
1831, HMS Beagle set out on her now-famous second voyage, to
complete the Admiralty’s survey of the South American coast. Her
captain was the brilliant young officer Robert Fitzroy, who had hired
a cleric-in-training to be his intellectual companion and the ship’s
naturalist. This Thing of Darkness is the story of that voyage
and its consequences for both Fitzroy and his ‘scientific gentleman,’
Charles Darwin. The two men got on well, despite their contrasting
temperaments (Fitzroy was a complex manic-depressive, Darwin a
relatively easygoing optimist) and backgrounds (Fitzroy was a minor
aristocrat, a descendant of Charles II, while Darwin belonged to a
family of nonconformist entrepreneurs and intellectuals). But Darwin’s
researches gradually led him into religious doubts, and began to seem
to Fitzroy like attacks on his own fundamentalist Christianity. Lest
this should all seem too dry-as-dust, Thompson has skilfully woven the
conflict of ideas between Fitzroy and Darwin into a tapestry of
danger, adventure, tragedy and satire, a story with a terrific sense
of period and place, peopled with memorable characters, major and
minor. Especially poignant are the tragicomic Fuegians, whom Fitzroy
had brought back to England o
As
someone who has lived in the Albany, New York, area much of her life,
I was unable to pass up this memoir cum novel set downtown on
Pearl Street in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Six year old Jean-Luc
LaPointe and his younger sister have been brought to poverty-stricken
North Pearl Street by their mother. Their long-absent father has found
them an apartment, and, for once, they will all live as a family. When
Jean-Luc, Anne-Marie and their mother arrive, they find the kitchen
decorated for a St. Patrick’s Day party, with green streamers and
green soda, and a note from their father saying he’s just gone out to
buy a green cake to make the celebration complete. He never returns.
The 1930s lower East Side of Manhattan comes to brimming life in this
novel/memoir. Told from the precocious viewpoint of nine-year-old Elka Roth, the odd duck of her three-generation family, we meet the
people of her Jewish neighborhood and the melting pot city around it.
Characters, both major and minor, come to immediate life. Widmer’s
details, from the squalor of the slum that is the family home to the
delicacies wrought by her beloved grandmother, leap from the page.