Books

The claim that Cecily is “Wolf Hall for the 2020s” is a big one. The best and rarest thing about Hilary Mantel’s novels telling the story of Thomas Cromwell and his world was their immersive detail. Mantel combined the precision of meticulous research with the...

Themed anthologies can feel like a gamble for the reader. Some recycle random literary bric-a-brac – old, quirky or famous, perhaps, although reading like a scrapbook of clippings. But the Dear Damsels collective have a wiser approach, looking forward to new writing...

Written from the viewpoint of Katharina Kepler, “seventy-some” years old and accused of witchcraft in seventeenth-century Germany, Rivka Galchen’s 2021 novel is a surprise because it’s often very funny. That’s because Katharina is a spiky, blunt narrator, endearingly...

On page 6 of his The Discovery of Witches (1647) the young English witchfinder Matthew Hopkins sneeringly recounts an anecdote about a Norfolk baker named Meggs. He’s using this man as an illustration of the behaviour of some of the people drawn into the 1645-7 witch...

Birdcage Walk is set in Bristol, England during the French Revolution. Then as now, Bristol was home to lively debate about the rights and wrongs of political life. In the 1780s-1790s there was a particular focus on the rights of women to hold property, access...

Historical fiction is a varied genre. There are novels in which characters from the 1600s twitter gratingly in twenty-first century cliches. There are novels that monologue worthily through true-but-dull facts and where every sentence needs a footnote. And then there...