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Tag: historical fiction

Silent in the Grave, Deanna Raybourn

My fourth book for the RIP Challenge, because apparently I just cannot get it together to read The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher right now.  Silent in the Grave is the first of (so far) three mysteries with Lady Julia Grey, whose husband passes away at the start of this book.  After his death, private investigator Nicholas Brisbane tells her that he believes her husband was murdered.  She rejects this possibility out of hand; but a year later, after her mourning time is over, she finds clues in her house that make her wonder – was he murdered?  And if so,…

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On Agate Hill, Lee Smith

A book I acquired in spite of my firm and as-yet-unbroken book-buying ban.  My lovely grandmother (my mum’s mum) sent it to me, all shiny and beautiful and hardback, along with an equally shiny and beautiful and hardback book about Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots not liking each other (I am excited about this as it has been quite some time since I read anything about the Tudors).  My grandmother loves to read.  She inherited booklust from her father, my great-grandfather, who loved Rafael Sabatini and who gave a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to my grandmother…

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The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie

The Enchantress of Florence is all about a Florentine stranger who comes to the court of Mughal emperor Akbar the Great (heehee, get it?) with a story to tell.  He claims that he is Akbar’s uncle (ish), the son of a great-aunt Akbar never knew existed.  It’s a bold claim, but the stranger is a bold man; and in the days that follow, he entrances Akbar with the story of three Italian friends (including Machiavelli because, you know, it’s Salman Rushdie, and why not?), and the parts they played in the tale of the stranger’s purported mother, the “hidden princess”…

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Fire from Heaven, Mary Renault

I will preface this by saying that I can understand how you might not like Mary Renault’s writing. But I like her a lot, and this, the first of her books about Alexander the Great, is the first thing I ever read by her. It takes us from Alexander’s childhood through to Philip of Macedon’s death, and it is a damn good book. I love how Mary Renault makes silence and implication work for her: how something will happen, and you don’t think anything of it, and then the characters react in a way that makes you go back and…

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The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, Katherine Howe

I told Colleen at Foreign Circus Library that I love books about research, and she ever so kindly sent it to me in the post!  Lucky me, I read it over the weekend.  Poor Connie has just got through with her qualifying exams – sounds like a nightmare, that lot, I don’t think I was sufficiently sympathetic to my dear friend tim when she was having quals (sorry tim!) – and her scatty New Age mother demands she go fix up her (Connie’s) late grandmother’s old house and get it sold.  While living at the house, Connie finds a little…

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The House at Riverton, Kate Morton

I am not able to steer myself away from books that deal with the dying aristocracy in Britain before and during and after the World Wars.  Or just books set in Britain before and during and after the World Wars (recently before and recently after, obviously; otherwise that would comprehend the whole of British history).  I love them.  I love books set in Britain in this time period even more than I love books set in the Victorian times.  At least more reliably – there are some books with Victorian settings that are shocking tedious crap. The House at Riverton…

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A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro

Here is what I think goes on in A Pale View of Hills.  I think.  (There will be spoilers, sort of.)  The frame story concerns the protagonist Etsuko receiving a visit from her daughter Niki, not long after her older daughter, Keiko, has committed suicide.  Etsuko is remembering a friend she knew long ago, when she still lived in Japan, a woman called Sachiko and her young daughter Mariko.  And I believe that what is going on is that Sachiko, actually, is Etsuko, and that Etsuko is trying to make her memories of having been a slightly careless mother to…

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The Meaning of Night, Michael Cox

I started reading this in Bongs & Noodles one time, a while ago, and I got bored.  I am more easily bored when I’m reading at Bongs & Noodles than I am in real life – maybe because Bongs & Noodles is all full of loads of brilliant books, and my time there is finite.  Anyway, then I read about it over at Superfastreader’s blog, and it sounded so good I decided to reconsider.  As often happens, I was very pleased that I did. The Meaning of Night is all about a Victorian gentleman called Edward Glyver who conceives a…

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The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Maggie O’Farrell

Let us begin with two girls at a dance. They are at the edge of the room.  One sits on a chair, opening and shutting a dance-card with gloved fingers.  The other stands beside her, watching the dance unfold: the circling couples, the clasped hands, the drumming shoes, the whirling skirts, the bounce of the floor.  It is the last hour of the year and the windows behind them are blank with night.  The seated girl is dressed in something pale, Esme forgets what, the other in a dark red frock that doesn’t suit her.  She has lost her gloves. …

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Those Who Hunt the Night, Barbara Hambly

When I am reading other people’s blogs and deciding which books I want to put on my list to read later on, I have started the habit of writing down what it is about their description of the book that attracted me.  That way, when I am on the library computer examining this book blog to see what I want to read next, I can choose what sort of book I am in the mood to read.  And what I wrote for this one was “a guilt-ridden ex-priest vampire in Victorian London!” which is totally not the point at all. …

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