Only the city is real, but this is no one’s idea of an ode. The Wolf and the Watchman, Niklas Natt Och Dag’s historical crime novel set in eighteenth-century Stockholm, is grotesque, nightmarish, brilliant and far and away the most disgusting book I’ve read since The North Water. Mickel Cardell is a shell-shocked amputee and…
Tag: Historical fiction
‘L’allée du Roi’ by Françoise Chandernagor (Book Review)
When looking back on the lives and impact of Louis XIV’s many mistresses, it is difficult to ignore the fact that Madame de Maintenon rarely makes the top of the list. In spite of her considerable political power, her sincere interest in the relief of the poor and her belief in the importance of educating…
‘The House with the Stained Glass Window’ by Żanna Słoniowska (tr. Antonia Lloyd Jones): Book review.
History, pain and identity pile up like strata across four generations of Russian-speaking, ethnic Polish women in Żanna Słoniowska’s stunning novel of Soviet Ukraine, The House with the Stained Glass Window. The young, unnamed female narrator of The House with the Stained Glass Window (Polish title : Dom z witrażem) lives with her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother in the Ukrainian city…
‘The Penelopiad’ by Margaret Atwood (review).
In a much-forgotten episode at the end of Homer’s Odyssey, twelve maids are mercilessly hanged for doing what women must in order to survive. Penelope, unraveller of shrouds and refuser of suitors, who patiently waits twenty years for her husband Odysseus to finish fighting and shagging his way around the Aegean, tells their story, and hers, in this radical feminist reinterpretation of The Odyssey.
‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ by George Saunders (review).
This is a difficult novel, full of pain and agony. If you have lost a loved one, you probably shouldn’t read it, and yet probably should. In President Lincoln, you will see yourself, and Willie will become for you the spitting image of the loved one you lost.
‘To the Bright Edge of the World’ by Eowyn Ivey (review).
A striking novel of love, discovery and the culture of cold, To the Bright Edge of the World brings nineteenth-century Alaska to searing, glorious life.
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel: Book Review
Her Ladyship commits the not-uncommon indiscretion of reading Wolf Hall after Bring Up The Bodies, and begins to think, as she does sometimes. Though Hilary Mantel’s publishers do her the great disservice of plastering the back cover and spine of her masterpiece with recommendations from two ludicrous sources who know less about literature than Sherlock…
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (Review)
‘Statements, indictments, bills are circulated, shuffled between judges, prosecutors, the Attorney General, the Lord Chancellor’s office; each step in the process clear, logical, and designed to create corpses by due process of law. George Rochford will be tried apart, as a peer; the commoners will be tried first. The order goes to the Tower, ‘Bring…
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