Tag: Historical Fiction

Posted in Netgalley, Personal Purchase

The Star and the Strange Moon by Constance Sayers.

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Constance Sayer’s latest book has a lot of her literary trademarks: time slip narratives; a mystery to solve; magic realism and romance. She places her story in the world of Hollywood and film-making, with two main characters – the actress Gemma Turner and young film-maker Chris Kent. In 1968 Gemma is staying in London with her rock star lover Charlie Hicks when she is offered an unexpected film opportunity. Until now Gemma has been making a series of surfing films based in California, but she’s been longing to make something that has more critical acclaim. French director Thierry Valden is part of the nouvelle vague or new wave movement and has offered her the lead role in his next film L’Etrange Lune a vampire film set in 19th Century France. He seems open to changes and often works with improvisation so her long held skills as a writer might be needed too. However, when she gets to Thierry’s chateau the mood seems to have changed. She is greeted by Manon Valden, who warns Gemma off her husband immediately which isn’t very welcoming. Thierry doesn’t seem like the man she met before and when she reads the up to date script it still has the same stilted dialogue, despite the potential changes she had sent him. When she finally speaks to Thierry alone, he makes it clear that something has changed. He had envisioned more of a collaboration both on the script and possibly in the bedroom, but L’Etrange Lune will be his final film and he can’t afford to take risks. Gemma will have other opportunities for scriptwriting but he won’t. The next day as they’re filming in the nearby town of Amboise, Gemma has a scene where she runs down a darkened and cobbled alleyway, seconds after calling action the camera has suddenly lost her. Has she fallen on the cobbles? Are the dark shadows concealing her? Maybe she’s walked off in a huff. Yet it seems Gemma is genuinely gone and as they look back over the scene on film, frame by frame, she’s simply disappeared in front of their eyes.

Christopher Kent has had a strange fascination with the actress Gemma Turner since he was a child. Now at film school in 2007, his attachment to the actress stands out because she was never one of the greats – students aren’t usually hung up on obscure actresses from a handful of surf films. He remembers the day he first saw her, in a hotel where vintage black and white photos of actors were hung next to every door. In a very chaotic and traumatic childhood, this was one of those moments where he and his mum were without a roof over their heads. Chris could sense his mum was edgy and on the verge of a mood change, but as they approached their room and she saw the photo by the door she flew into a rage. She pulled the picture of Gemma Turner off the wall and smashed it, shouting personal insults and expletives. What was her link to the actress? Knowing Chris’s fascination with Gemma, his girlfriend and fellow student Ivy comes to him with a strange proposition. Every ten years Gemma’s final film, L’Etrange Lune, is shown to a select group of 65 guests at a randomly chosen cinema. Ivy’s father is one of the 65, but for this viewing he has offered Ivy his two place. They must wear a mask and cloak, but most importantly of all they must never approach or try to identify other members, nor can they talk about what they’ve seen. Chris doesn’t know what to make of the film. It seems to be a rather formulaic vampire movie, but there’s something odd about Gemma’s performance, almost haunting in fact. While in some places it’s fairly average, in other scenes there’s an incredible intensity to her acting. It’s almost as if she’s genuinely terrified.

I found the book a little slow at first, but once we reached Gemma’s disappearance I was hooked by this strange story. As we reach Gemma’s timeline in France and Chris starts investigating her disappearance several decades later, the pace of both timelines really picks up. There are suddenly enough strange and impossible happenings for the reader to start wondering what’s coming next. To be honest it felt like anything might happen! I loved the sense of evil created by the film – the strange melancholy that falls over those who see it, something that worsens if you keep going back every ten years. The rumours that the film changes in that decade are intriguing and suggest someone is still behind the lens. Could one of the 65 be playing tricks on the rest? Perhaps not letting on they have extra scenes that Thierry discarded, or that they have found an actress who is the double of Gemma Turner. Is something magical at work here? Despite all the warnings, I did understand Chris’s need to investigate, even when those he interviews start to feel the consequences of talking. This is such a clever concept and the author creates a real sense of mystery with wonderful period detail, especially in the 19th Century when there’s much discussion on the restriction and discomfort of women’s fashion especially in the summer. I also enjoyed 1960’s London where Gemma’s lover Charlie is part of a Fleetwood Mac-esque band where partners are swapped as readily as song lyrics. There’s even a very unexpected romance woven within this magical and unexpected series of times and worlds. What I wanted to see more than anything was for Chris to overcome the trauma of his childhood and fulfil his potential, wherever and whenever that might be.

Out in paperback from Piatkus 28th March 2024

Meet the Author

Constance Sayers is the author of A Witch in Time, The Ladies of the Secret Circus, and The Star and the Strange Moon from Hachette Book Group.

A finalist for Alternating Current’s Luminaire Award for Best Prose, her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

She received her master of arts in English from George Mason University and graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor of arts in writing from the University of Pittsburgh. She attended The Bread Loaf Writers Conference where she studied with Charles Baxter and Lauren Groff. A media executive, she’s twice been named one of the “Top 100 Media People in America” by Folio and included in their list of “Top Women in Media.”

She splits her time between Alexandria, Virginia and West Palm Beach, Florida.

Posted in Netgalley

The Women by Kristin Hannah

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I was completely engrossed by this incredible piece of historical fiction, covering a period of history and viewpoint I’d never read about before. All the Vietnam stories I’ve encountered have fallen into two categories and were made for the big screen; combat movies like Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, or the more domestic based aftermath of war at it’s best in the excellent Coming Home with Jane Fonda and Jon Voigt. I’d never considered that there would be women in Vietnam, which seems crazy since I’d avidly watched MASH when it was rerun in the 1980’s. The series set in a field hospital showed women in the operating theatres, as members of the US Army Medical Corps. Yet, I’ve never encountered anything that showed them in Vietnam, so I was fascinated by Frankie’s story; her personal experiences as well as the politics and societal changes around her tours of duty. What struck me most was how this war ripped the generation gap wide open. Most people my age will remember the Paul Hardcastle single ‘19’ and for me the most stark line in it was ‘none of them received a hero’s welcome’. It struck me how different the government and public response was to these veterans, the majority of whom were no less brave or noble than the WW2 veterans their fathers had been. The author deals with all these themes in a story about the women that served in Vietnam, the women that America forgot.

Frances McGrath is your typical All American teenage girl, living with her family on Coronado Beach. She has memories of growing up on that beach, swimming and surfing with her brother Finley. She is from a good family and expectations are that she will have the ‘right’ marriage and become a mother. However, things change when Finley makes a huge decision. He’s enlisted for Vietnam. It’s no surprise that he might go into military service at some point. Frankie’s dad has a wall in his office called the ‘Hero’s Wall’ where every family member’s military service is celebrated with cuttings, photos and medals. All the men, anyway. Yet not many of their friends and family members have sons who’ve voluntarily enlisted for Vietnam. There are ways of avoiding the draft, depending on who you know. Yet Finley enlists of his own accord, possibly believing the American government’s assertions that they must fight communism in Vietnam, lest it become even more widespread. Within weeks there’s a knock at the door; Finley has been killed in action. In a whirlwind of grief Frankie starts looking into her options. She wants to honour her brother and become a hero worthy of her father’s wall. Both the Air Force and Navy need a nurse to complete a long period of training before they’re posted to work in the field. However, if she enlists in the US Army, they’ll post her out to Vietnam after basic nursing training. Much to her parent’s shock Frankie is soon on her way to Vietnam.

The author creates such an incredible sense of place, I was in Vietnam with Frankie. The all pervading humidity and dampness of everything actually made me feel grubby. There’s a red dust blowing everywhere, that sticks to the constant sheen of sweat on Frankie’s skin and gets into every wrinkle. Frankie’s kitbag and everything she owns takes on the smell of mildew and she never feels dry. At first the bursts of gunfire and explosions in the jungle are surprising and Frankie is anxious, but soon they just become the everyday backdrop to her work. The ‘whump- whump’ of the helicopters arriving with MASCALS (mass casualties) control when she eats, sleeps and relaxes. The first experience of a MASCAL is shocking and Frankie does freeze, but the surgeon she’s working with talks her through it, let’s her know that he trusts her and she can do it. Gradually it becomes easier, although their injuries and the emotions of triaging these men can stay with her. If someone is beyond saving they are left to die, while they operate those they can save. It isn’t just the soldiers though, the unit treats Vietnamese soldiers and locals caught in the crossfire. The use of napalm and the injuries it caused really has stayed with me, the jelly like substance sticking to the casualty’s skin and keeps burning. Frankie is soon a first class combat nurse, that’s not to say these experiences become easy, they just become the norm. When we tuck trauma away in a box without processing it, it sits until we’re ready to open the lid or until a new experience forces that lid open. Usually when we least expect it. Her new relationships keep her going, especially those with her friends and fellow nurses Ethel and Barb. They are the glue that hold each other together and while men may come and go, the bond these women build is lifelong and loyal. That’s not to say there aren’t men. Frankie falls in love with Jamie, the surgeon she works with and the war only intensifies those feelings. There’s also the constant fear of losing them. Later on, a face from the past reignites feelings of first love but brings with it so many complications.

Frankie’s return and adjustment to everyday life on her return from war becomes yet another battle. Now she’s completely safe it’s as if all the feelings she had in Vietnam are bubbling to the service, manifesting in physical and mental symptoms. Her parents are relieved she’s home in one piece, but they don’t seem proud of what she achieved and her accolades don’t make the hero’s wall. She doesn’t seem to fit anywhere. Here Barb and Ethel are worth their weight in gold, taking Frankie in when she needs to get out of California and spending time talking through their experiences. No one else will ever get her like these women. Their lives do move forward though and Frankie just seems stuck. I thought this part of the story was beautifully done and represents so much research and care on the author’s part. She is very aware that although Frankie isn’t real, women did live through these experiences and had to find ways to reconcile their memories of war and their hurtful return to an ungrateful homeland they’d put their lives on the line for. It was as if the world had shifted on it’s axis while they were in the jungle. I was longing for Frankie to have a happy ending, because I thought she deserved it and I thought she still had so much to offer. I learned so much about a conflict I’d only experienced through film and usually from a male perspective. I was completely immersed in Frankie’s world and didn’t want to let it go.

Out now from MacMillan

Meet the Author

Kristin Hannah is the award-winning and bestselling author of more than 20 novels. Her newest novel, The Women, about the nurses who served in the Vietnam war, will be released on February 6, 2024.

The Four Winds was published in February of 2021 and immediately hit #1 on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Indie bookstore’s bestseller lists. Additionally, it was selected as a book club pick by the both Today Show and The Book Of the Month club, which named it the best book of 2021.

In 2018, The Great Alone became an instant New York Times #1 bestseller and was named the Best Historical Novel of the Year by Goodreads.

In 2015, The Nightingale became an international blockbuster and was Goodreads Best Historical fiction novel for 2015 and won the coveted People’s Choice award for best fiction in the same year. It was named a Best Book of the Year by Amazon, iTunes, Buzzfeed, the Wall Street Journal, Paste, and The Week.

The Nightingale is currently in pre-production at Tri Star. Firefly Lane, her beloved novel about two best friends, was the #1 Netflix series around the world, in the week it came out. The popular tv show stars Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke.

A former attorney, Kristin lives in the Pacific Northwest.

http://www.kristinhannah.com

Posted in Squad Pod

A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh

Posted on by thelotusreaders

“Peach. Its shape floats on Mr Bell’s mouth. The pinch of the p, followed by a rounded push of the lips, sending the last syllable hard across the tongue. My hand nearly reaches for my pocket, as if the feather from our lessons might still be found there. It’s been a long time since I thought of the feather. I would balance it on my knuckles and make it quiver with the puff of my ps. Puh-puh-puh. I stop myself just in time, folding my hands against my skirts.”

I found the opening scene of this novel incredibly moving and so skilful, placing us so close to our heroine that we understand the barriers she faced being deaf at that point in history. In it, Ellen and her fiancé receive an unexpected visit from Alexander Graham Bell. As the two men converse, Ellen is picking up body language and tone of voice which indicate a serious topic but she notices a repeated word ‘peaches’. Her attention moves to the beautiful jar of peaches preserved by her mother on the dining table. Yet she’s wrong, as she passes Mr Bell the jar and urges him to take it he tells her no, the word he was saying was ‘speeches’.

As Ellen reminisces, so did I. I was propelled back to the early years of my nephew Charlie, who was born visually impaired. Before we knew the full implications of his sight loss, we’d noticed he was behind in his development. He wasn’t moving round much, had put on weight and wasn’t speaking. It then occurred to us. In order to learn something for the first time, we tend to copy it. If you can’t see, you can’t imitate others and just as Ellen is struggling to get the full meaning of Mr Bell’s conversation, Charlie couldn’t form the words if he didn’t know how to use his mouth to make the noises. So Mum used the same technique she’d used with us when we were small. When a specific noise was needed like the ‘puh’ sound in the book, Mum would raise his hand to her mouth and make the sound against his fingers. He would then put his fingers to his own mouth a copy her. It was lovely to relive that memory and feel perhaps a tiny bit of what Ellen is feeling too.

A Sign of Her Own is narrated by Ellen Lark across two timelines and it’s an incredible feeling to be in her world, because it’s so different from the world we know. It felt similar to when actress Rose Ayling-Ellis did Strictly in 2021 and performed a ‘Couple’s Choice’ dance with Giovanni Pernice, choreographed to bring the audience into Rose’s world. At a certain point, the music stopped but the couple continued to dance and we realised that this was Rose’s world. For us the music would return, but she carried on dancing into the silence. She somehow used her trust in Giovanni and read his body to perfect her dance routines. It was moving, disorienting and a complete revelation so it was no surprise to me that they were winners of that year’s BAFTA for a memorable TV moment.

Ellen’s inner world is also a revelation and the author communicates it so beautifully. She lost her hearing as a child during a bout of scarlet fever and communicated with her mother using a language of signs they made up as they went along. It broke my heart to read how the sound of her speech was viewed by local children. Restricted to vowel sounds, because she couldn’t hear the precision of the consonants, Ellen feels shame about how she sounds. Her personal sign language seems to suit her, but it’s her grandmother who comes up with the idea of using Alexander Graham Bell’s ‘Visible Speech’. Students of his method were banned from using any sort of sign language, but were allowed to use a notebook. Family politics played their part in the decision, because the family were in debt to their grandmother. Luckily Ellen enjoyed studying and proved to be incredibly clever, even if she was unsure about Bell’s method and his motives. She has to be perceptive and learns to read people very quickly, including Bell. As we move into the present day, Ellen and her fiancé are visited by Bell who is embroiled in a fight to be recognised as the sole inventor of the telephone. He wants Ellen’s support as a character witness, but Ellen doesn’t have good memories of her time under his tutelage. She feels like he betrayed her and other deaf students for his own fame and recognition. How can she support him when she feels so conflicted?

During the later timeline Bell’s fight becomes all consuming. He is full of determination and I felt torn about his character because on one hand he appears to be paying attention to a group of people rather alienated by the rest of society so his work could be seen as altruistic. On the other hand it’s as if the people he’s helping don’t really matter to him. There’s a narcissism or selfishness in his character that means he only sees his students in terms of how they can help him potentially find fame. I felt like he didn’t appreciate their characters or individuality. I found myself disliking him intensely. By contrast, Ellen is instantly likeable and intelligent. Through her we are invited into the deaf community and the debate over sign language and visible speech is fascinating. As someone who has studied disability theory, I was very aware that some people don’t consider their deafness a disability. If they sign, they simply see themselves as speakers of a different language. I was interested in the politics and ethics of a speaking world imposing a method of communication on the deaf community, rather than the community coming to society with their own choice of language or speech method. I think there are many readers who might never have considered these issues and wondered how the book is being received in the deaf and/or disabled community. I was impressed that the author wanted to bring these issues to the fore and loved the enthusiasm she clearly has about her subject and her heroine. This is a well researched debut clearly inspired and informed by her own experiences of deafness as a child. It puts us into the centre of that experience and I came away feeling like I had a renewed awareness of sensory disability.

Thank you so much to the Squad Pod Collective and Tinder Press for my copy of A Sign of Her Own, published on Feb 1st 2024

Meet the Author


Sarah Marshwas short-listed for the Lucy Cavendish Prize in 2019 and selected for the London Library Emerging Writers Programme in 2020.A Sign of Her Ownis her first novel, inspired by her experiences of growing up deaf and her family’s history of deafness

Posted in Publisher Proof

The London Bookshop Affair by Louise Fein

Posted on by thelotusreaders
Books and Bramble, the perfect combination.

Historical fiction is one of the genres I enjoy most and I’m drawn to Louise Fein’s novels because she always finds an interesting time period then looks at it from an unexpected viewpoint. It makes you rethink events you thought you knew all about. Here she has chosen post-WW2 London and the dawning of the early 1960’s when Kennedy is president and the Cuban missile crisis is looming. Her heroine is Celia, an ordinary young woman with older parents who are stricter than most and perhaps don’t understand her modern preoccupations and ambitions. I always imagine the ‘swinging sixties’ when I think of London at that time, but progress like that hasn’t quite reached Southwark yet. Celia is working at a second hand bookshop, that specialises in antique and collectible books. Yet her heart yearns for adventure. The world is on the cusp of space travel, women’s liberation and the Beatles. It’s also rather closer to nuclear war than most realised as the USSR and USA start a terrifying game of brinkmanship. Celia wants to protest against the testing and gathering of weapons far more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. She also chasing her dream career – she’s signed up for classes at Pitmans to gain the secretarial skills that might get her a job at the BBC. The little life her mum leads is not for her and she’s definitely not going to settle for Sam, the boy next door.

The catalyst for change is the bookshop’s new owner Mrs Denton, a dainty well dressed lady who is living alone in the flat above the shop. She seems more interested in shopping than books and offers Celia a raise to manage the shop as she sees fit. Mrs Denton has two regular male visitors: an older man called Mr Humphries who has wandering eyes and a scar down his face and a younger, handsome American called Septimus who Celia is drawn to. Could he be another pathway to a different life. The changes in Celia’s life are interspersed with a different timeline following a young woman called Anya Moreau who is dropped behind enemy lines in 1943. She’s been trained to help the French Resistance disrupt the Germans by sending messages back home via a wireless transmitter. She is betrayed by a double agent and faces torture to divulge her secrets, but she never betrays her cause. Meanwhile Celia finds a connection to this woman and in her desperation to know more she comes across the mysterious Miss Clarke who opens Celia’s eyes to the murky world of espionage running under the surface of everyday life. Possibly even in her own family. I felt for Celia’s parents who have always been protective of their girl, so much so that she sometimes feels suffocated. However their determination to keep Celia away from the past is understandable when we find out the truth.

I throughly enjoyed both timelines and Louise always has a wealth of research underpinning her story making it feel so real. I believed entirely in these two brave young women and their conviction to support their country. I loved seeing Celia’s political awakening as she talks to friend Daphne about the secret nuclear bunkers being dug out in the English countryside and the drastic measures to move works of art out of London – her shock at the immorality of a government that chooses to save art, but keeps it’s ordinary citizens in the dark is a real moment of growth. Her friendship with one of Mrs Denton’s visitors, Septimus, is also a place where she can freely discuss and share ideas about the world. This freedom to debate is new to Celia and you can see her growing all the time. At home her mum turns the tv off when the depressing news is on and Dad never talks about the war. In fact there seems to be a silence between them. I was excited and scared for Celia as her world opens up. The secrets she starts to discover will change her life forever, but will they leave her with the confidence to choose her own path and who will walk it with her? The emotional scenes between mum and daughter are really heart rending as finally everything is brought into the light. The pace of the novel really picked up towards the end as both stories come to their conclusions and different options start to open up before her. I really hoped Celia would choose wisely and not throw away everything about her home while still gaining some of the adventures she’s set her heart on. This was a great read and would make a fantastic film or TV series one day.

Published by William Morrow on Feb 29th 2024

Meet the Author

Louise writes historical fiction, focusing on unheard voices or from unusual perspectives. Her debut novel, Daughter of the Reich (entitled People Like Us in the UK edition) was published in 2020 into 13 territories and is set in 1930’s Leipzig. The book was shortlisted for the RSL Christopher Bland Prize 2021 and the RNA Historical Novel of the Year Award, 2021. Louise’s second novel, The Hidden Child, was published in 2021 and is centered around the eugenics movement in 1920’s England and America. It was a Globe & Mail bestseller in Canada. Her third novel, The London Bookshop Affair, about one woman’s journey to uncover secrets of her past, set against a backdrop of espionage and looming nuclear war in 1962 London, will be published in January 2024. 

Louise, previously a lawyer and banker, holds an MA in Creative Writing from St Mary’s University and now writes full time. Equally passionate about historical research and writing, she loves to look for themes which have resonance with today’s world. Louise lives in the Surrey countryside, UK, with her family, and is a slave to the daily demands of her pets.

For more information, go to https://www.louisefein.com and sign up to Louise’s newsletter. She also posts regularly to her blog at

https://www.louisefein.com/blog-and-news, or follow her on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/louisefeinauthor; Twitter, https://twitter.com/FeinLouise; or Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/louisefeinauthor

Posted in Netgalley, Publisher Proof

Maud Horton’s Glorious Revenge by Lizzie Pook.

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Maud’s sister Constance is on a ship sailing to the Northern Passage, on a mission to find Franklin’s expedition ship. She has always craved adventure and climbed out of her bedroom window, taking the disguise of a cabin boy called Jack Aldridge. Does she really comprehend the dangers that could befall her should the men on board discover a woman on their vessel? On the same voyage is the rather strange and macabre Edison Stowe who has managed to get aboard as a scientific officer – mainly involving the killing and gathering of animals, as bone specimens or in jars. When Constance is lost on the voyage, the rather quiet and timid Maud is determined to find out what has happened to her sister. She devises a plan to get close to and expose Edison Stowe. Telling her grandfather she’s on a trip to the country, she embarks on a rather ghoulish steam train journey. Stowe has a money making scheme to turn various public hangings into a tourist attraction and Maud becomes one of his tourists. The author uses three different narrative voices to tell her story. A diary written by Constance on the voyage was returned to her family and gives us a front row seat for the horrors but also the wonders of the voyage complete with edible arctic creatures, ‘esquimaux’ women and the northern lights playing overhead. Then in the present day there’s Edison Stowe’s narrative of his day to day life, living in Mr Inchbold’s bone shop and dodging debt collectors. His debts being the reason behind his execution tourism. Finally, there’s Maud, whose narrative hangs everything together and provides context with memories of the sister’s lives and her own relentless quest for the truth.

Maud and Constance are fascinating characters, both sisters with the hearts of lions and nerves of steel. It just takes Maud longer to realise she is every bit as adventurous and brave as her sister. Maud has the disarming advantage of beauty and a composed, modest manner that makes her seem the ideal ‘Angel in the House’. Her knowledge of pharmacy and toxicology is honed by years of helping her grandfather in his shop. She is proud of her sister and has never believed the official version of her death, but we never realise the extent of her plotting and planning until the final few chapters. What an opponent she has in the villainous Edison Stowe! Not since Uriah Heep have I felt so uncomfortable while reading about a character. He constantly made me want to wash my hands. He’s a strange contradiction in all sorts of ways: dressed like a gentleman but absolutely penniless; seemingly genteel but capable of moments of extreme violence against those weaker than himself, people or animals. He seems oddly unmoved by inflicting violence, but has strange fits of illness, where he appears to pass out as well as seeing and hearing things, including people long dead.

I was absolutely fascinated by this novel from start to finish. I love books that subvert what we think about the supposedly straight laced Victorians, especially women. She doesn’t downplay the dangers women faced, especially those that try and move outside of their boundaries. It was interesting that it was far more successful for Maud to use her strengths as a woman, than to try and be like a man like Constance. I enjoyed the more macabre and decadent tastes of the Victorians such as Mr Inchbold having a shop full of animal skeletons and a bear welcoming people at the door, the popularity of the gruesome murder room at Madame Tussaud’s and the fascination with collecting such ghoulish souvenirs as Staffordshire figures of the people they’ve just watch hang. Lizzie always creates such a fabulous sense of place and I was feeling the arctic cold and really smelling the crowds, both at the hangings and in the pub at the quay where sailors come unwashed and straight off the boats and monkeys are racing round the tables. These little extra details keep you immersed in her worlds. We even get an unexpected love story that further breaks the image people have of the Victorians. This is such an incredible story and a must for people who love their historical fiction to surprise and compel them.

Published by Picador, Hardback and Kindle Editions 1st Feb 2024.

Meet the Author

Lizzie is an award-winning writer and journalist. She is the author of Moonlight and the Pearler’s Daughter, a STYLIST and WOMAN & HOME ‘Best Books of 2022’ pick.

Lizzie began her career in women’s magazines, covering everything from feminist motorcycle gangs to conspiracy theorists, before moving into travel writing, contributing to publications including Condé Nast Traveller, Lonely Planet and the Sunday Times.

Her assignments have taken her to some of the most remote parts of the world, from the uninhabited east coast of Greenland in search of polar bears, to the trans-Himalayas to track snow leopards. She was inspired to write Moonlight and the Pearler’s Daughter, her debut, after taking a road trip through Australia with her twin sister after the death of their father. A chance visit to the Maritime Museum in Fremantle led her to an exhibition about a family of British settlers involved in the early pearl diving industry. Thus began an obsession and a research journey that would take Lizzie from the corridors of the British Library to isolated pearl farms in the farthest reaches of northwest Australia.

She lives in London.

Posted in Squad Pod

The Knowing by Emma Hinds

Posted on by thelotusreaders

If this author had a certain readership in mind when writing this debut novel, she might as well have had a picture of me. I would have picked this book up on the strength of the cover alone. Three of my all time favourite books are: The Crimson Petal and the White set in the seedier areas of 19th Century London with a heroine is a prostitute called Sugar; The Night Circus that appears without warning, held together by real magic and the result of an epic battle between two magicians; The Museum of Extraordinary Things where our heroine is a mermaid, exhibited in a freak show at Coney Island. See what I mean? It’s perfect for me. The blurb promised me a tattooed mystic, a show run by a prostitute with dwarfism and real life New York gangs and Barnum as their contemporaries. It’s quite a heady mix and I was enthralled from page one. Flora is a tattoo artist and mystic, in an abusive relationship with a tattooist called Jordan, a member of an Irish gang the Dead Rabbits. She longs for escape from the slums of Five Points and the degrading relationship she’s been in since she was a teenager. Then she meets Minnie, a beautifully dressed woman whose dwarfism has led her to a career as a circus and freak show performer. Minnie promises Flora a career and life in an opulent town house uptown, not to mention her freedom. However, the freedom she’s promised comes with certain conditions.

Flora stays with Minnie, in her palatial bedroom and bathroom within the townhouse that belongs to her lover, Chester Moreton. Avoiding Chester’s advances seems to be one condition of Flora’s freedom, along with constant worry about being found by Jordan’s friends in the Dead Rabbits gang. She’s to earn her keep as a mystic, with her tattoos and tarot cards the centre of attention. Minnie knows that Flora’s skills run deeper, although she’s always been warned to hide them and ‘tell nuthin’. Flora’s gift is ‘the knowing’ an ability to summon the dead that’s always on the periphery of her performances, but kept at bay by Flora’s willpower. It’s when she’s pushed into allowing her spirit guide to break through that the trouble begins. At the Hotel du Woods she exposes the abuser and killer of a young boy, setting in motion a chain of events including suicide, murder and madness. Flora and Minnie escape and voyage to Manchester, where they try to survive on what they can earn from sex work and Flora’s tarot readings, but the past is never far behind and once again Flora finds herself at the centre of a love triangle where obsession and betrayal are medicated with drugs and alcohol and a tragic end seems inevitable.

I felt fully immersed in the novel immediately as the author creates an incredible sense of place. Five Points is grimy, deprived and controlled by gangs. I loved how the author used the grotesque throughout the novel and particularly where she’s describing the slums of New York and Manchester, filled with rats, unwashed bodies and an ever present grime that’s sticky on the skin. This took me straight back to university and Kristeva’s theory of abjection. The things that women’s bodies can do are magical or monstrous. Flora’s body is a conduit, allowing the dead to speak through her. Minnie’s body is seen as grotesque by others, but she wears angel’s wings and when she’s in bed with Flora it’s the softness of her skin that’s noticed first. All women have a transformative power to produce another life, when their pregnancy isn’t terminated by the men in their lives. The author doesn’t hold back when describing the reality of life for women, particularly women like Flora who haven’t had choices. Bodies seem divorced from minds when it comes to sex with men, as torsos become slabs of meat, breaths are whisky sour and skin is raw, red and broken. Sex is rarely consensual and always comes with violence. It’s a grim world so any chance to escape into a better future is welcome. The gentle and pleasurable attentions of Minnie are a promise of things to come, where Flora could have choices and sexual experiences that come from a loving place instead of a place of ownership.

No one here is perfect. Each character is morally grey and I loved that complexity in their personalities and the ambiguity it brought to their actions. I was also transfixed by the sheer power of Flora’s ‘knowing’. Mediumship has become something of a joke these days, a formulaic stage show where people are picked out of the audience and told that Grandad left the priceless clock in the attic or under the floorboards. It’s always benign and a little bit boring. Flora’s spirits are not there to guide her and they’re definitely not benign. They want to expose truths, tell the subject’s darkest secret and even mete out punishment where necessary. The first seance at Hotel du Woods is successful from one viewpoint – the spirits do come through – but a disaster from the other side when a vengeful spirit talks a man into killing himself. No one will be booking them again! Flora will have to learn how to control the spirit’s power and keep the vengeful ones at bay. Strangely, for a story where our main character is prevented from carrying children, this felt like a story about mothers too. It’s about the lack of a mother when growing up and how the lack of motherly love and protection feels, but it also shows the people who fill that void and become mother figures. This could be a difficult read for some, especially the sexual violence, but it would have been the daily reality for women living in 19th Century slums and for some women in upper Manhattan townhouses. I desperately wanted Flora to survive and have the right people around her, to give her the feeling of being loved and wanted. This is an addictive read of vengeance, betrayal and obsessive love and I couldn’t stop reading until I knew the truth of Flora’s fate.

Meet the Author

Emma Hinds is a queer novelist and playwright from Manchester. She focuses on untold historical Queer narratives and her debut novel, The Knowing, from Bedford Square Publishers is coming in January 2024.

Posted in Throwback Thursday

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

Posted on by thelotusreaders

‘Holding her robust infant, Beatrix murmured a prayer in her native Dutch. She prayed that her daughter would grow up to be healthy and sensible and intelligent, and would never form associations with overly powdered girls, or laugh at vulgar stories, or sit at gaming tables with careless men, or read French novels, or behave in a manner suited only to a savage Indian, or in any way whatsoever become the worst sort of discredit to a good family; namely, that she not grow up to be een onnozelaar, a simpleton. Thus concluded her blessing — or what constitutes a blessing, from so austere a woman as Beatrix Whittaker.’

Some people didn’t know Liz Gilbert until the film ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ came out, in fact I was surprised to learn how many people hadn’t known about or read the book. I’d really enjoyed the book and found the film ok, but thought it didn’t dwell enough on the psychological and spiritual aspects of her journey. It had a mixed reception at my book club where some really identified with her character, but others were screaming how lucky she was to have a publisher willing to fund her trip of a lifetime during her divorce as many have to continue getting the kids to school, going to work and only having the millisecond before sleep hit them to have anything resembling a spiritual or self-aware thought. I’d not expected the anger and jealousy that it evoked in some readers. So it was with trepidation that I approached her novel The Signature of all Things. If I’m honest I probably wouldn’t have sought it out, but I was in one of my favourite bookshops while on holiday in Wales and I saw it in the second hand section. It was such a beautiful book that I had to buy it and I flicked through it back at the holiday cottage, then was sucked in very quickly and all my planned reading went out of the window. I was stunned to be sailed around the globe from London to Amsterdam, Peru and Tahiti. Even more exciting was the heroine, Alma Whittaker, daughter of a famous explorer, plant hunter and botanist. I was drawn to her intelligence, her busy mind, her assertion that she is the equal of any man and the depths of her feelings.

The book begins be setting up Alma’s early life and family situation, so we meet her father and his beginnings in botany as a boy apprentice to a plant hunter- actually a punishment for some very sneaky thefts from Kew Gardens. His incredibly enterprising ideas mean that by the time Alma is born he is a very rich man, with a mansion in Philadelphia. His fortune has been made in the quinine trade, a medicine extracted from the Cinchona tree found in Peru then traded and grown around the world to produce a drug for malaria. At his home, White Acre, he and his wife have two daughters: Prudence their adopted daughter who follows an extraordinary path into abolitionism and Alma. Alma is a tall, large-boned girl who is described as ‘homely’, but is intelligent, determined and secretly contains well pools of sexual curiosity, all qualities that seem unusual for her gender in this time period. Her father’s belief that all people should be given the opportunities that enable them to manage others and excel in their own chosen field governs the household. ‘All’ really does mean all in William’s case and his daughters are given a thorough education at home, rivalling any man. Both he and his Dutch born wife are clearly progressives and Alma flourishes with the opportunities they give her to become a very accomplished botanist in her own right and perfectly able to develop her own projects and command the voyages necessary to hunt for the plant she has set her heart on. Unexpectedly, at an age when scholarly spinsterhood is expected to be her path, a painter visits White Acre and Alma falls deeply in love. This painter believes Joseph Boehme’s philosophy that all of nature contains a divine code, every flower and every creature – such as the Fibonacci sequence. Their two interests combine and while Ambrose is a utopian artist, often found to be painting orchids rather than studying them in a lab, they do have the same passion for nature. Where he saw life as divine and a guardian angel watching over him, Alma saw a life as a struggle where only the fittest survived, something she found out for herself when exploring:

“Then — in the seconds that remained before it would have been too late to reverse course at all — Alma suddenly knew something. She knew it with every scrap of her being, and it was not a negotiable bit of information: she knew that she, the daughter of Henry and Beatrix Whittaker, had not been put on this earth to drown in five feet of water. She also knew this: if she had to kill somebody in order to save her own life, she would do so unhesitatingly. Lastly, she knew one other thing, and this was the most important realization of all: she knew that the world was plainly divided into those who fought an unrelenting battle to live, and those who surrendered and died.“

Of course, this love is not the end of Alma’s story. Liz Gilbert isn’t going to let a man eclipse Alma or create a sappy rom-com ending to such a strong, feminist story. Alma and Ambrose represent two great schools of thought in the 19th Century, that of the spiritual and the scientific. These two schools of thought had equal status and often intermingled to this point, but as the century progressed a complete separation occurred where spirituality became a belief without reason and science became fact without a divine sense of wonder. Could the common ground that Ambrose and Alma thrive upon at first, survive the divide between their two disciplines? Make no mistake though, Alma is the protagonist here and she’s one of my favourite characters ever. I loved her drive (sadly lacking in this writer) and her preservation of it, no matter what. She can speak five languages at five years old! Oh and two dead ones. Her educational achievements aside, it was her confidence and self-belief that stood out to me. Yet here we are two centuries later in a crisis of confidence, with an epidemic of imposter syndrome and doubts about how to be women. Alma is wholly herself, even when at times that might seem steely, reserved and abrupt. She believes that everyone is the master of their own self, including women. It is sad that the introduction of Prudence to their family is the catalyst for Alma experiencing negative self- thoughts. She wishes to keep Prudence, who has been staying with the Whittakers since a family tragedy, but her presence is an opportunity for comparison – the ultimate thief of joy. Alma realises for the first time that she is not beautiful. She retreats into her work at moments of doubt or unhappiness, even extreme heartbreak and loss. It is her refuge and the one area of life that she can control and that she continues to be confident in. I truly admire her ability to continue. To live.

The research that Liz Gilbert must have undertaken for the verisimilitude of this novel is colossal. She writes with a 19th Century sensibility, keeping Alma completely grounded in her place and time. The first rule of creative writing – show, don’t tell – is so strongly in place that I felt like I was with Alma, only seeing or hearing things at the same moment she does. This brings such an immediacy to the novel that it gallops on at quite a right, especially considering this is the story of a 19th Century dowdy and academic spinster. It’s a book that a lot of people might not consider reading from the blurb, which is why it needs to be highlighted in this way. It ranges across biology, exploring, business, philosophy, science, the mystical and yes, the sexual. There are secrets kept all the way to the end that I really didn’t expect at all. I have to say that my favourite review of this book is a negative one. Mainly because it made me laugh out loud, but also because it unwittingly makes you want to read it.

“I was actually enjoying this and then at 49% a spinster has a spontaneous orgasm from holding hands with a dude in a closet.”

left by Goodreads Member, Sylvia, October 2nd 2015

I don’t know about you, but I’d want to read that book!

Meet the Author

Elizabeth Gilbert is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, as well as the short story collection, Pilgrims—a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and winner of the 1999 John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares. A Pushcart Prize winner and National Magazine Award-nominated journalist, she works as writer-at-large for GQ. Her journalism has been published in Harper’s Bazaar, Spin, and The New York Times Magazine, and her stories have appeared in Esquire, Story, and the Paris Review.

Posted in Netgalley

Lady McBethad by Isabelle Schumer

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I was first introduced to Macbeth thanks to my crush on Sean Bean. I was living in Milton Keynes at the time and studying for my English Lit degree. We knew that Macbeth was coming in our final year and when we found out that Sean Bean would be playing the title role at our local theatre we had to see it. It was a production that had some unusual choices, but an incredibly clever banquet scene that has stayed with me. However, it was the more recent Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard film that I found absolutely spellbinding and moving in it’s depiction of Macbeth and his wife as two grieving parents. It gave some context to their actions in the play, particularly Lady Macbeth who is often depicted as a power hungry harpy who coerces her husband into a violent act that he’s unable to live with. I’ve always thought Lady Macbeth was done a disservice, depicted rather like Eve in the garden of Eden as a woman dissatisfied with her lot who convinces her husband to eat apples from the only tree God expressly told them not to touch. According to most dramatists she’s greedy, dissatisfied and power hungry. She was ripe for a rewrite and here it is in Lady Macbethad.

Gruoch has druid heritage and her grandmother prophesied that she would be Queen of Alba. She believes in this prophecy and will try her best to fulfil it. She was born the daughter of a King, even though her father has now been ousted. Her heart and desires are with Macbeth but she is the betrothed of Duncan, the heir elect and marriage to him should enable her to fulfil her destiny. Yet life at court comes with it’s difficulties, it’s lonely and uneasy to know every woman at court would do anything to be in her position. He coronation approaches, with the women keeping her at a distance and giving her the cold shoulder. An unexpected turn of events tears her plans apart and she’s forced to run for her life and leave her ambitions for the crown behind. Now she must fight just to survive, never mind the crown.

This was a really interesting take on the tale of Macbeth and a woman whose motivations are always unclear. There’s a feel of Eve about her, it is Macbeth who wields the knife yet in many depictions I’ve seen, the emphasis is on Lady Macbeth as the instigator of the killings. The evil temptress whispering in the blameless man’s ear. I was intrigued by a retelling of the story, based on a real woman who did marry a man called Macbethad who became the king of Scotland. The book starts as a fiction about Gruoch, but becomes an origin story for the character of Lady Macbeth. I thought these two women were brought together well, creating one character. She does have aspects of character that Shakespeare establishes in the play, becoming a scheming, power hungry woman. She’s also rather paranoid and even violent in her own right. However, whereas in the play we don’t know why she is this way, here we get her back story and have an opportunity to understand her a little better. Even if we don’t necessarily like her.

Macbethad seemed to be more balanced and measured in character. He stands out for this, which seems an irony when I expected to respond to Gruoch more sympathetically. There are other characters in the book based on real people from history, covering their family allegiances and their conflicts. I think it’s so difficult to marry historical facts with a fictional story in this way and I was impressed with the author’s attention to detail. She sets the book firmly in it’s Scottish setting by using Scottish Gaelic, as well as the stories and folklore of the area. She brought to life the conflict between the established pagan traditions and the growing practice of Christianity, something I found really interesting. Her descriptions of the place felt vibrant and alive, I could actually see it. She is equally vivid when it comes to the more brutal aspects of the story. There were parts of this book that I enjoyed immensely and I would definitely recommend it to those interesting in historical fiction and Shakespeare.

Meet the Author

Isabelle Schuler is a Swiss Hawaiian-American actress, writer and former Waterstones bookseller. She has a BA in Journalism and her screenplayQueen Hereafter was longlisted by the Thousand Films Screenwriting Competition in 2019. In 2020, Schuler adapted Queen Hereafter into her debut novel, Lady MacBethad. She lives in Hertfordshire.

Posted in Publisher Proof

Bone Rites by Natalie Bailey

Posted on by thelotusreaders

“I collected the first bone when I was twelve… Such a tiny little bone, more like a tooth. I only kept it to keep him safe.” Kathryn Darkling, imprisoned in Holloway, is facing death by hanging for her vengeance killing. Haunted by a spirit, she still hopes to perform the ancient black magic that will free her soul, or her struggle to punish the mighty will have been in vain. Will the love of her life come to her aid? Or can she find a way to escape her fate?

Bone Rites is a dual timeline story, split between the early 1900s and 1925 when Kathryn Darkling is in Holloway, the women’s prison, where she awaits the date of her own execution, by hanging. While waiting Kathryn starts to tell her story to a priest, assigned to hear her final words and offer solace as she awaits death. She begins with the first time she found a bone and performed a rite, then works her way through to her training as a doctor in Edinburgh. All the while she is developing her practice of performing bone rites, a black magic focused on freeing her soul. As she tells the stories of her bones, I started to wonder about her version of events. Clearly she’s an incredibly intelligent and determined woman and I admired that, but should I be taking the owned of a convicted murderer? Is she a reliable narrator? She seems to be slipping into madness as the tale goes, but does that mean everything she’s telling us is a lie? The thing I most enjoyed was getting inside Kathryn’s head and trying to work out what makes her tick, rather like holding a counselling session with this imaginary character. As we drifted back into her early childhood, I became won over by this obstinate little girl who won’t be deterred from her purpose. We learn about how tough her upbringing was, alongside her little brother Freddie. I love a dark story with a sense of foreboding and I thought this was perfectly pitched for a Halloween read. It’s not a traditional ghost story but Kathryn is certainly haunted, like many of us are by our pasts. I thought the book perfectly fitted it’s timelines, one before and one after WW1 considering how much change and trauma happened in-between. I also enjoyed the LGBTQ+ representation in the novel, it’s fascinating when authors ‘write back’ to a time where minority groups are under represented. All in all this was a well- written piece of historical fiction with a rather macabre edge and an admirable heroine.

Out on Nov 1st from Aurora Metro Books

Meet the Author

Natalie Bayley is author of ‘Bone Rites’, ‘Lolita’s Daughter’, ‘The Secret Life of Grandmothers’, ‘The Witch Who Saved Paris’ and ‘The Lady Lyttle Murder Mystery’ series. Her dark thriller ‘Bone Rites’ was selected for the 2019 Blue Pencil long list, went on to be shortlisted for the 2021 Blue Pencil First Novel Award and was long listed for the 2021 Caledonia prize before becoming the Winner of the Virginia Prize for Fiction. Natalie lives in NSW, Australia and enjoys ocean swimming and whispering to cats. Born in the UK, she’s been in sunny Australia since 2000. Her books are always about justice and how a seemingly powerless underdog can always find a way to fight back. My spooky historical fiction novel, BONE RITES, won the prestigious Virginia Prize for Fiction and is being published by Aurora Metro books October 2023. Enjoy!

Posted in Random Things Tours

Mr Hammond and the Poetic Apprentice

Posted on by thelotusreaders

What were our great poets before they were great? Long-time NHS doctor Mellany Ambrose has penned a historical novel about the time John Keats spent training in medicine before he chose to follow poetry. She discovered Keats had been apprenticed to an apothecary surgeon a few miles away from where she was working as a GP and it sparked her curiosity.


“Why hadn’t he become a doctor? How would such a supposedly sensitive individual react to the horrors of medicine in an era with no anaesthesia, antibiotics or antisepsis?” Mellany asks, explaining, “I’d struggled in our modern era; his was far worse. In my first week as a nineteen-year-old medical student, I had to dissect a body. I felt unable to process the shock and enormity of it and wrote a poem to help me cope. Did he write poems to express his emotions as I had? And what would it have been like to have the young Keats as your apprentice?”


The story is set in 1814. Thomas Hammond is an apothecary surgeon whose apprentice is eighteen-year-old local orphan, John Keats. Thomas sees John as a daydreamer who wastes time reading. Thomas failed to save John’s mother four years earlier, and when John criticises Thomas’s methods tempers flare on both sides. Despite their differences, Thomas and John begin to develop a grudging respect for each other with Thomas seeing a humanity in the way John relates to patients. Their relationship deepens into one more resembling father and son while Thomas’s true son, Edward, disappoints his father. Thomas realises John is gifted and would make a skilled surgeon, but to help John succeed Thomas must confront his own past mistakes. On the verge of qualifying as a surgeon, John unexpectedly abandons medicine for poetry, ending all Thomas’s hopes. Thomas is devastated and struggles to find meaning in his life and work. As he faces one final challenge, can the master learn some valuable lessons about life from his poetic apprentice before it’s too late?

Out now from Troubadour Publishing

Meet the Author

I worked as a hospital doctor and general practitioner in the NHS for nearly 30 years. My interest in Keats’s medical career arose when I discovered he’d trained as an apprentice close to where I was working as a GP. I spent many happy hours researching in the British and Wellcome Libraries and visiting sites related to Keats’s life and Georgian era medicine.

 

See my website mellanyambrose.com for more on Keats and the history of medicine

Instagram @mellanyambrose

Twitter @mellanyambrose