Any
new novel by Kate Atkinson is almost guaranteed to top my favorites list. Shrines of Gaiety is a brilliantly drawn
portrait of the seamy underworld of London in the aftermath of the First World
War, involving an uptight policeman and a no-nonsense heroine in a search for
two disappeared girls.
As always with Atkinson, the format of the crime-mystery
genre provides an opportunity to achieve something more ambitious – a literary
novel with a light touch, at once deeply funny and profoundly affecting.
If,
like me, you opt for the audiobook version, Jason Watkins’ mellow narration is
an absolute treat.
'Atkinson on her finest form. A marvel of plate-spinning narrative knowhow, a peak performance of consummate control.' OBSERVER
'This is the perfect novel for uncertain times.' THE TIMES
'I can think of few writers other than Dickens who can match it' SUNDAY TIMES
'Brilliant' RICHARD OSMAN
'Kate Atkinson is simply one of the best writers working today, anywhere in the world' GILLIAN FLYNN
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1926, and in a country still recovering from the Great War, London has become the focus for a delirious new nightlife. In the clubs of Soho, peers of the realm rub shoulders with starlets, foreign dignitaries…
We’re obsessed with the Tudors, but the ordinary people of
sixteenth-century England are all too often left out of the picture.
Mark
Stoyle’s book invites us to reconsider a dimly remembered moment in time when
commoners demanded to be heard. In the summer of 1549, a large popular rebellion
against the religious changes of the Reformation erupted in Devon and Cornwall
and threatened to shake the foundations of the state.
It is a compelling and
tragic story, which ended with slaughter and retribution on an immense scale.
Stoyle’s telling of it is a triumphant demonstration that meticulously
researched historical scholarship can also be enjoyably readable and
emotionally engaging.
Professional historians generally
steer away from historical novels set in their own area of expertise. Still, I made an exception for the Act of Oblivion,
which is painstakingly researched as well as beautifully written.
The title
references the pardon offered at the Restoration to all who fought against the
king in the English Civil War but which exempted the ‘regicides’ – those who
signed the death warrant of Charles I.
The story follows two of them,
Colonel William Goffe and his father-in-law, Colonel Edward Whalley, to the
American colonies after 1660, with a
vengeful royalist agent determined to track them down.
The book enfolds an
exciting chase narrative, but in the end, Harris produces something more lyrical
and reflective: a moving meditation on idealism and the price it invariably
exacts.
'A belter of a thriller' THE TIMES 'A master storyteller . . . an important book for our particular historical moment' OBSERVER 'His best since Fatherland' SUNDAY TIMES
'From what is it they flee?' He took a while to reply. By the time he spoke the men had gone inside. He said quietly, 'They killed the King.'
1660. Colonel Edward Whalley and his son-in-law, Colonel William Goffe, cross the Atlantic. Having been found guilty of high treason for the murder of Charles the I, they are wanted and on the run. A reward hangs over their heads - for their…
Peter
Marshall’s sweeping history of the English Reformation ―the first major
overview for general readers in a generation―argues that sixteenth-century
England was a society neither desperate for nor allergic to change but one
open to ideas of “reform” in various competing guises.
King Henry VIII wanted
an orderly, uniform Reformation, but his actions opened a Pandora’s Box from
which pluralism and diversity flowed and rooted themselves in English life.
With sensitivity to individual experience as well as masterfully synthesizing
historical and institutional developments, Marshall frames the perceptions and
actions of people great and small, from monarchs and bishops to ordinary
families and ecclesiastics, against a backdrop of profound change that altered
the meanings of “religion” itself.
