Archives de catégorie : Historical Fiction

THE BOOKBINDER OF JERICHO de Pip Williams

The second novel from the international bestselling author of The Dictionary Of Lost Words.

THE BOOKBINDER OF JERICHO
by Pip Williams
‎ Affirm Press Australia, November 2022
(via via Kaplan/Defiore Rights)

Whose truth is lost when knowledge is controlled by men? In 1914, when the war draws the young men of Britain away to fight, it is the women left behind who must keep the nation running. Two of those women are Peggy and Maude, twin sisters who work in the bindery at Oxford University Press. Peggy is intelligent, ambitious and dreams of going to Oxford University, but for most of her life she has been told her job is to bind the books, not read them. Maude, meanwhile, wants nothing more than what she has. She is extraordinary but vulnerable. Peggy needs to watch over her.
When refugees arrive from the devastated cities of Belgium, they send ripples through the community and through the sisters’ lives. Peggy begins to see the possibility of another future where she can use her intellect and not just her hands, but as war and illness reshape her world, it is love, and the responsibility that comes with it, that threaten to hold her back.
THE BOOKBINDER OF JERICHO is a story about knowledge – who makes it, who can access it, and what truth may be lost in the process. In this beautiful companion to the international bestseller The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams explores another rarely seen slice of history seen through women’s eyes. Intelligent, thoughtful and rich with unforgettable characters.

Pip Williams was born in London and grew up in Sydney. She has spent most of her working life as a social researcher and is the author of The Dictionary of Lost Words and two nonfiction books. This is her first novel. Pip lives in the Adelaide Hills, Australia with her partner, two boys and an assortment of animals.

DAS LIED DES HIMMELS UND DER MEERE d’Anne Müller

Sensitive, atmospheric, funny – the new book by this author of much-lauded, clever women’s literature.

DAS LIED DES HIMMELS UND DER MEERE
(The Song of Sky and Sea)
by Anne Müller
‎ Penguin Germany/PRH Verlagsgruppe, March 2022

Schleswig, 1872. Emma’s mother is furious when she turns down a proposal from an eligible bachelor. Rather than marry a man she doesn’t love, though, Emma boards the steamship Borussia and emigrates to California. In San Francisco, she accepts a position as companion to a wealthy widow, and soon falls in love with the likeable timber merchant Lars. They get married and plan to start a family, and Emma goes to live with him on Humbolt Bay. Yet their marriage remains childless, Lars is often away on business, and Emma is lonely. When Hans – owner of a shipyard, Lars’s closest friend and best man at their wedding – offers her a position in his office, the two of them develop deep feelings for each other. But there is a love that cannot be.
Touching and refreshing, captivating and with subtle humour, Müller’s novel tells the story of a headstrong young woman who goes against convention, and searches for, finds and follows her own path.

Anne Müller lives in Berlin. After studying theatre and literature sciences she freelanced as a radio journalist before turning to screenwriting. Sommer in Super 8, her first literary novel, found many enthusiastic readers. Zwei Wochen im Juni, her second novel, took her back to her homeland on the Baltic Sea.

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF LOVE de Caroline Petit

Based upon the true story of 19th-century French explorer, naturalist and diplomat the Count de Castelnau and his lover Madame Fonçeca, a sweeping historical narrative set in the wilds of Brazil, the salons of Paris and Melbourne in its early settlement days. For fans of Pip Williams’ The Dictionary of Lost Words and Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things.

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF LOVE
by Caroline Petit
Affirm Press, May 2022
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights)

Australia, 1902: When lawyer Nathan Smithson takes on the case of mad, wealthy Edward Fonçeca’s inheritance trial against his ruthless brother Charles, he must unearth long buried family secrets to have any chance of winning.
Brazil, 1852: Carolina Fonçeca is 16 years old and longing to leave the confines of her family’s remote Brazilian sugar plantation. François, the Count de Castelnau and French Consul to Bahia has fallen dangerously ill with a fever on a naturalist expedition and been delivered by Tupi Indians to the Fonçeca household. With a head full of Balzac and dreams of Parisian life, Carolina is instantly beguiled by the middle-aged Frenchman.
But what François has failed to tell Carolina is that he has a wife and son back in France. Desperate for a new life, Caroline makes a decision which will haunt her forever.
From the salons of Paris to the snobbish sitting rooms of Melbourne’s high society, the couples’ unhappy deception must continue. Meanwhile, the lives of their sons’ begin to unravel: Charles into thuggery, Edward into madness.

Caroline Petit was born in Washington D.C., raised in Maryland and now lives in Melbourne, Australia with her husband. She is a graduate of Chatham College in Pittsburgh and holds advance degrees from Johns Hopkins University, the London School of Economics, and the University of Melbourne’s School of Law. Her previous novels, The Fat Man’s Daughter and Deep Night were published in the US by Soho Press.

SOMETHING WICKED de Laura Purcell

From the Sunday Times bestselling author, and recent Edgar Award nominee, Laura Purcell, a gripping tale of obsession, superstition and ambition, set against the atmospheric backdrop of Victorian London. Be careful what you wish for… it may just come true.

SOMETHING WICKED
by Laura Purcell
‎ Bloomsbury, August 2022
(via Mushens Entertainment)

By the pricking of my thumbs…
At The Mercury Theatre in London’s West End, rumours are circulating of a curse. It is said that the lead actress Lilith has made a pact with Melpomene, the tragic muse of Greek mythology, to become the greatest actress to ever grace the stage. Suspicious of Lilith, the jealous wife of the theatre owner sends dresser Jenny to spy on her, and desperate for the money to help her family, Jenny agrees. What Jenny finds is a woman as astonishing in her performance as she is provocative in nature. On stage, it’s as though Lilith is possessed by the characters she plays, yet off stage she is as tragic as the Muse who inspires her, and Jenny, sorry for her, befriends the troubled actress. But when strange events begin to take place around the theatre, Jenny wonders if the rumours are true, and fears that when the Muse comes calling for payment, the cost will be too high.
…Something Wicked this way comes

Laura Purcell is a former bookseller living in Colchester, Essex with her husband and pet guinea pigs. She began her career with two historical novels about the Hanoverian monarchs, Queen of Bedlam and Mistress of the Court. Her first Gothic novel The Silent Companions was a Radio 2 Book Club pick, was selected for the Zoe Ball ITV Book Club and was the winner of the Thumping Good Read Award. Her other Gothic titles include The Corset, Bone China and The Shape of Darkness. In the USA Laura is published by Penguin Books, where The Corset is titled The Poison Thread and Bone China is called The House of Whispers. Additionally, Laura’s short stories have been published in a number of collections.

FIRE SEASON de Leyna Krow

A feminist novel upending the archetypal « western » in the vein of The Sisters Brothers meets Inland, set in 1889 in Washington Territory on the heels of a great fire about an inadvertently dangerous psychic and the two conmen she meets on her path to redemption.

FIRE SEASON
by Leyna Krow
‎Viking, Summer 2022
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

For the citizens of Spokane Falls, a fire that destroyed their frontier boomtown was no disaster; it was an opportunity. Set in 1889 in Washington Territory on the heels of this event, FIRE SEASON tells the story of three characters who seize big opportunities the fire brings, though in different ways and to different ends. Barton Heydale, manager of the city bank, uses the ensuing chaos to embark on schemes of fraud, forgery, and kidnapping. Quake Auchenbaucher, a conman, suddenly finds his career in manipulation jeopardized. And there’s Roslyn Beck, an alcoholic prostitute with the ability to see the future and with whom both men fall madly and dangerously in love. Unbeknownst to them, she has a deviant influence that, for better or worse, can change the world. As their paths collide, diverge, and collide again, these three come to terms with their own needs for power, greed, and control — leading one to total ruin, one to heartbreak, and one, ultimately, to redemption.
In the incandescent, genre-bending spirit of Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, Karen Joy Fowler’s Sarah Canary, or Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, with notes of Ottessa Moshfegh’s quick wit and wicked imagination, FIRE SEASON is playful, creepily magical, and historical, yes, but not in the traditional sense. The setting is a darkly whimsical approximation of what the Pacific Northwest was like at the end of the 19th century, and the characters may seem better suited to the modern literary fabulism of someone like Aimee Bender or Kelly Link than the wild west.

Leyna Krow’s first collection I’m Fine, But You Appear to Be Sinking (Featherproof Books, 2017) was a finalist for The Believer Book Award. Krow lives in Spokane, Washington with her husband and two children. She is at work on her second novel.

Photo credit: Young Kwak