The best historical fiction books of 2025 — so far

The New Forest Murdersby Matthew Sweet

In the summer of 1944 the Nazis are retreating, but they plan to unleash a terrifying new weapon on the British. In the quiet New Forest village of Larkwhistle, Jill Metcalfe learns of her brother’s death from Jack Strafford, a US officer who was his colleague in covert operations. Strafford has further, startling news to convey: someone in Larkwhistle is sending information to the Germans to help them to pinpoint the new weapon’s targets. He invites Jill to join him in tracking down the traitor, but their investigation becomes entangled with a murder inquiry when the son of the village vicar is found dead in the woods. Secrets are dragged into the light and further tragedy ensues. A first novel by the broadcaster Matthew Sweet, this is a witty, unusual murder mystery. NR
Simon & Schuster £18.99 pp416
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The Listeners by Maggie Stiefvater

The Avallon hotel in the Appalachian mountains is renowned for its luxury and for the magical quality of its hot springs. In the aftermath of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor it is commandeered by the US government to intern Nazi sympathisers and Axis diplomats. The resourceful general manager, June Hudson, and her staff must learn to cater for this different clientele. In her first novel for adults Maggie Stiefvater, a bestselling writer for teenage readers, has boldly mingled genres. The fantasy elements do not always sit comfortably within her historical narrative but this is an ambitious work that brings its setting and its large ensemble of characters vividly to life. NR
Headline £20 pp432
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Love, Sex & Frankenstein by Caroline Lea

In 1816 the teenage Mary Shelley travels to Geneva with her lover, the brilliant, self-absorbed poet Percy Shelley, and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont. The trio join the self-exiled Lord Byron at his villa where, to pass the time, the host suggests the competition to create a supernatural tale, which resulted in Mary’s novel Frankenstein. Possessed of one of the most eye-catching titles among recent historical fiction, Love, Sex & Frankenstein is the latest work by Caroline Lea, the author of The Glass Woman and The Metal Heart. Like those earlier novels, it demonstrates Lea’s skill in resurrecting the past but its greatest success lies in its portrait of Mary — a complex, troubled young woman about to summon gothic literature’s greatest creation from the depths of her imagination. NR
Michael Joseph £18.99 pp400
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Objects of Desire by Neil Blackmore

In New York in the early 1980s, the celebrated novelist Hugo Hunter has been offered $2 million to write a new novel and memoir. There’s only one problem: Hugo did not write the two bestselling novels that made his name. He stole them. Hugo narrates this account of his life. In Aids-shadowed 1980s New York he is famous and hangs out with literary superstars — Truman Capote, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Gore Vidal. They bitch and network, write and drink. One of Hugo’s younger lovers asks, bewildered: ‘‘Is that what it’s like, knowing novelists? They just talk about themselves the whole time, and are mean about everyone else?”

Hugo takes us further back, to his childhood in Wales, an unhappy place for those who were gay and bookish. He moves to London, desperate to be a famous novelist. Though he can’t actually write, he sets out to become part of the literary scene, meeting George Orwell, Christopher Isherwood and Elizabeth Bowen. With his first act of literary theft, Huw from Wales becomes the fêted Hugo Hunter.

Objects of Desire is an absolute gem. It is dark, funny and iconoclastic. The monstrous Hugo is wonderfully rude about the writers he meets. Nabokov is a “try-hard c***”, Mailer is a “sweaty, pale toad, entirely grey”. Hugo forgets to read his friend Gore Vidal’s huge tome on Lincoln, speed-reads what he can, then makes “high-end jokes about sex” to distract Vidal from the shallowness of his reading. A must-read for anyone who loves books, complete with a moral for wannabe writers: perhaps the only thing worse than failure is success. Antonia Senior
Hutchinson Heinemann £18.99 pp368
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The Propagandist by Cécile Desprairies, translated by Natasha Lehrer

An unnamed girl regularly joins gatherings of her female relatives in her mother Lucie’s grand apartment. There are secrets and hushed conversations about the war. Her morphine-addled grandmother tells a story about the mass deportation of French Jews during the Nazi occupation. She was offered a gold watch by a desperate Jewish man in return for water. She pocketed the watch and left him thirsty. The narrator reports: “It was told with no emotion. I wondered if I had heard right.”

The girl grows up to be a historian and sets out to find out about her family’s past. She discovers details about her mother’s first marriage to a fascist Frenchman. The relationship is “deadly earnest” and humourless; the two young people are as passionate about their devotion to Nazism as they are about each other. Lucie becomes a propagandist for pro-Nazi newspapers and her family are delighted that her job has catapulted them into “the collaborationist smart set”. After the war, Lucie and her family are unrepentant, downplaying their culpability.

This autobiographical story by Cécile Desprairies, a historian of the Occupation, is told in taut, unflashy prose. The narrator never explicitly judges her family; she just lays out their embrace of Nazism in cool detail. The result is devastatingly effective. AS
Swift Press £14.99 pp208
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Cleopatra by Natasha Solomons

Cleopatra’s life was so extraordinary, who can begrudge her yet another retelling? Natasha Solomons does a wonderful job in this novel, which takes Cleopatra from childhood to the death of her protector Julius Caesar. Narrated in the first person, this story shows Cleopatra as a clever child in a court full of vipers. Her father, the king of Egypt, is weak and struggles to contain internal enemies as well as the Romans who envy Egypt’s wealth and grain. Cleopatra’s solace is her friend, confidant and slave Charmian.

Cleopatra and her father travel to Rome, where they are treated with scant respect. She is befriended, however, by Servilia, Caesar’s lover and sister of Cato, the famed senator. Servilia narrates a few of the chapters, allowing us to see Egypt and Cleopatra through Roman eyes. When her father dies, Cleopatra is married to her vile brother and they rule the kingdom together. But the tensions between the two threaten to tear Egypt apart, allowing Caesar to push himself forward as a power-broker, mediating between the two for Rome’s advantage. Cleopatra has one asset her brother lacks: her body.

Solomons has a fine eye for the intersection between the politics of state and of the bedroom. There is some lovely imagery in her writing too. Describing the scene in her beloved library, Cleopatra describes how “the sun noses through the high windows like a snooping schoolboy hoping to copy my work”. A fresh and lively take on a well-known tale. AS
Manilla Press £16.99 pp352
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The Cardinal by Alison Weir

Tom Wolsey, the son of a Suffolk tradesman, is a boy of notable brilliance. The Church offers the best route for a clever boy of humble background to become influential. But Tom is not a natural churchman; his faith is less profound than his ambition and he is as lustful as the next man. In time, Tom rises through the ranks to be become Henry VIII’s chief adviser and cardinal. But Tom finds the king ever harder to handle as Henry becomes older and more embittered.

Readers familiar with Tudor history and Wolf Hall will know that it does not end well for the cardinal. The historian and novelist Alison Weir portrays Tom as a man of keen ambition whose love for the dazzling young Henry is unfeigned. Weir’s prose cannot bear comparison to Hilary Mantel’s, but her thorough knowledge of the period is evident. This is a rich and textured portrait of Cardinal Wolsey. AS
Headline Review £25 pp480
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The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin

The director GW Pabst is a giant of Weimar Germany’s film industry. When the Nazis come to power, he crosses the Atlantic into American exile but finds Hollywood so uncongenial that he returns to Europe. There, circumstances trap him in his native Austria. Desperate to make films again, he agrees to work for Joseph Goebbels and the new regime, believing that he will be able to maintain his independence and bow only to the demands of art rather than propaganda. Pabst is fooling himself. Inevitably, he is drawn into complicity with the Nazis. Finally, he is reduced to using slave labour as extras in the film he struggles to finish while the madness of the Third Reich’s final days surrounds him. Admired by Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith, Daniel Kehlmann has produced a subtle, often darkly funny novel about the relationship between art and power as exemplified by a brilliant man who loses his way in a moral maze. Nick Rennison
riverrun £22 pp352
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Gabriële by Anne and Claire Berest, translated by Tina Kover

Based on the life of the authors’ great-grandmother, Gabriële is an intriguing portrait of a remarkable woman, and of Paris during one of its most vibrant eras. Married to the artist and writer Francis Picabia and lover to the artist Marcel Duchamp, Gabriële Buffet was at the heart of the French capital’s intellectual and artistic life at the start of the 20th century. The Berest sisters’ aim is to rescue their ancestor from the oblivion into which she has fallen and to reveal her as her own woman, not merely one defined by the men who loved her. In doing this they have also summoned up, with exceptional liveliness and intensity, a vanished world of art, love and experiments. NR
Europa £20 pp432
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Ghost Wedding by David Park

Although he may not have as high a profile as some other Irish novelists, David Park has been writing carefully crafted fiction for decades. His latest work is about two men, separated in time by nearly a century, who are haunted by actions from their past that threaten to undo them in the present. In the aftermath of the First World War, George Allenby struggles with memories of the trenches as he oversees the building of a lake in a country house’s grounds and embarks on a cross-class affair with a housemaid. In the present day, Alex is about to marry Ellie in the same country house but there are things he hasn’t told her that may destroy their happiness. Park tells their parallel stories with skill and insight. NR
Oneworld £16.99 pp288
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Traitor’s Legacy by SJ Parris

The author of a number of enjoyable historical thrillers featuring the maverick Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno, SJ Parris begins what promises to be an equally entertaining new series with this novel set in late Elizabethan England. Her central character is Sophia de Wolfe, a former agent for the government in its fight against Catholicism, who is drawn back into the murky world of espionage after the discovery of a murdered girl’s body on a building site in London. The victim is a powerful man’s ward and a note found on the corpse is written in a cipher known only to Sophia and a few others. As Parris’s plot unfolds, Sophia faces threats to her life and so too do those she loves. Meanwhile, the queen’s spymaster, Robert Cecil, weaves his web of deceit behind her back. NR
Hemlock £20 pp384
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The Pretender by Jo Harkin

John Collan has the sort of problems that peasant boys had in 1483: his daily life is made bothersome by his mortal enemy, a goat, and his widowed father has stopped talking to the dairy maid. But his life is upended when a shifty aristocrat arrives and takes him away from his village. He is, he is told, the real Earl of Warwick and the great new hope of the Yorkist cause in its endless civil war with the Lancastrians. He was apparently switched at birth and hidden by his blue-blooded father. John is 12 and the Earl of Warwick is ten, but what are such trifling details?

John is given a new name to hide behind, Lambert Simnel, and groomed for power. He is rigorously tutored in Oxford, then taken to Ireland and put into the household of the Earl of Kildare, a powerful nobleman with some unruly daughters. One of them, Joan, takes John in hand and teaches him to be tougher, more arrogant, more kingly: “You need to wake up. You need to get yourself a courtly countenance. Courtly claws, courtly teeth.” The reluctant John is swept along by the plot to make him King of England. Sometimes he does not know who he is — peasant, aristocrat, pawn, rightful king? Most of the time he is just a boy trying to work out how to be a man.

Jo Harkin has loosely based her novel on the real life of Lambert Simnel, a pretender to the throne during the early years of the reign of Henry VII. The Pretender is an absolute delight, at turns funny, moving, filthy and original. Simnel might not win the English crown, but this is a frontrunner for historical fiction book of the year. AS
Bloomsbury Circus £18.99 pp464
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The Eights by Joanna Miller

In 1920 Oxford University admitted women as full students for the first time, allowing them to take degrees. In this sparkling debut by Joanna Miller we follow four of them as they start their university career. They live on corridor No 8 of St Hugh’s, a women-only college run by the formidable Eleanor Jourdain, and become known as the Eights. Awkward Beatrice lives in the stifling shadow of her mother, a famous suffragette; Otto is aristocratic and obsessed with maths; shy Marianne has a secret, albeit one guessed early by an observant reader. Dora, the beautiful daughter of a nouveau riche family, has lost both her brother and fiancé in the war.

The novel follows the young women as they deal with prejudice and Miss Jourdain’s strict rules — no men, no booze, no fun. Miller does a fantastic job of recreating these lives and making us care about each of her characters. The Eights is also an inspiring reminder of the trail blazed by clever women in the past. All three of my daughters will have a copy pressed on them as university beckons. AS
Fig Tree £16.99 pp384
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• The best books of 2025 so far — our critics’ picks

The Savage Isle by Michael Arnold

Cullen, a young boy of the Atrebates tribe, is a shepherd in pre-Roman Britain. One day in AD42 he returns home as his people are being brutally attacked by the fearsome Catuvellauni tribe headed by Caratacos, the legendary war leader. His family is killed and he is seized by the raiders. An orphan, he has to make a new life amid the tribe he despises. He bides his time, training to become a warrior so that one day he will be able to take revenge on Caratacos. Meanwhile, the chief of his broken tribe makes his way to Rome. Berikos wants to use the might of the Roman Empire to destroy the Catuvellauni. It’s a dangerous tactic to do business with the Romans. The lost world of the ancient Britons is vividly and memorably recreated in The Savage Isle, the first instalment in a new series by Michael Arnold, who wrote the excellent Stryker novels about the English Civil War. AS
August Books £16.99 pp352
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The Golden Hour by Kate Lord Brown

The orphans Polly and Juno met at boarding school in interwar Britain. Juno always dreamt of being an Egyptologist and discovering the lost tomb of Nefertiti, the stepmother of Tutankhamun. A few years later, as war threatens to break out in 1939, Polly and her new husband, Fitz, arrive in Cairo, where she is reunited with Juno. Her old friend is close to realising her dream of becoming an archaeologist, but her ambitions are being stifled by her unpleasant and domineering husband, Alec. Polly sets out to help Juno fulfil her dreams and join a dig in the Valley of the Kings. There is a second storyline, set in the 1970s. Polly’s daughter, Lucie, is an archaeologist, inspired by her godmother Juno. One day she is summoned to her mother’s house in Beirut, a city on the edge of civil war. Polly is dying of cancer and must reveal a secret to Lucie that will change her daughter’s understanding of her life, her family and the search for Nefertiti’s tomb. AS
Simon & Schuster £18.99 pp448
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Mere by Danielle Giles

In 10th-century East Anglia, at the heart of treacherous fenland, a remote convent faces crisis. The disappearance of a servant boy sparks talk of a curse laid on the sisters, and even the fiercely disciplinarian abbess Sigeburg can do little to quell the rumours. The arrival of Wulfrun, a visionary and aristocratic recruit to the order, adds to the disruption and catastrophe looms. Isolated by the rising waters of the surrounding mere, the sisters face slow starvation after a fire destroys their food store. We watch through the eyes of Hilda, the spirited infirmarian to the sisters, who forms an intimate, transgressive bond with Wulfrun as the community starts to disintegrate. Fear threatens to overwhelm faith. Older beliefs than Christianity swim to the surface. Amid a descending darkness, can hope and love survive? Danielle Giles’s first novel conjures up the early medieval world with startling richness and intensity. NR
Mantle £16.99 pp384
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Eden’s Shore by Oisin Fagan

Angel Kelly is a young idealist in 18th-century Ireland, excited by the writings of Rousseau and Voltaire. He dreams of establishing a utopian community in Brazil where enlightenment notions of freedom and brotherhood can become a reality. Setting sail across the Atlantic, however, he suffers terribly from seasickness and discovers, to his horror, that he is aboard a slave ship. Mutiny and the casting of men into the ocean brings the voyage to an end. Angel is washed up in a land where his dreams of a better world mean little. As in Fagan’s first novel, Nobber, which was set in medieval Ireland, exuberant, often darkly funny prose propels readers through a historical novel like few others, filled with bizarre characters and unexpected plot twists. NR
John Murray £16.99 pp342
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Dangerous by Essie Fox

Lord Byron, condemned as “mad, bad and dangerous to know” by his former lover Caroline Lamb, is a suitable candidate for the antihero of a gothic mystery, and several writers over recent years have cast him in such a role. The latest is Essie Fox. Dangerous is set in Venice in 1819, where Byron, exiled in disgrace from England, is pursuing a life of pleasure and brief sexual encounters. He has been falsely credited with the writing of a novel entitled The Vampyre, and there are even rumours that he is himself a vampire. When young women close to him are found dead with wounds to the throat, he is accused of being their killer. His life under threat, Byron must turn detective and investigate the murders. What could so easily have been a risible premise for a novel becomes, in Fox’s expert hands, the starting point for an atmospheric thriller. NR
Orenda £16.99 pp300
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Smoke and Silk by Fiona Keating

Murder mysteries set in the Victorian era are so frequently published that it is difficult to write one of any great novelty. In her debut novel, Fiona Keating has succeeded, largely by creating an original, appealing protagonist around whom she builds her plot. Pearl Fitzgerald, the daughter of a Chinese mother she never knew and an Irish father, returns after seven years away to the Limehouse pub where she grew up. Her father, the landlord, is dying and his blowsy barmaid Betty is intent on stealing her inheritance. Pearl’s plans to thwart her are complicated when she stumbles on a Chinese workman dying of stab wounds on the Thames shoreline. Apart from the victim’s sister, Mei Lin, to whom Pearl is immediately attracted, no one seems very interested in the murder, so the two women join forces to investigate. As they delve deeper into Limehouse’s criminal underworld, Keating crafts an unusual and enjoyable crime story. NR
Mountain Leopard £20 pp384
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Rapture by Emily Maguire

Medieval chronicles said that a clever and learned woman was elected pope with the help of her lover, and held the post for two years in the 9th century. Although Pope Joan, who reigned as John VIII, probably didn’t exist, she is fertile territory for novelists. In Rapture, motherless Agnes is raised in Mainz by her English father, a priapic priest. Through him she meets a monk called Randulf, who talks to her as if she is a person with ideas and not just a girl.

After a tragedy, Agnes disguises herself as a boy and sets off with Randulf to a monastery with a renowned library. She wants to read, and think, and pray, although her lust for Randulf is a distraction from her calling. Although torn between the cerebral and the earthy, Agnes/John becomes a renowned scholar and theologian, eventually finding her way to Rome. There, amid the fattened, avaricious, lustful servants of the church, her ascetic piety and intellectual brilliance mark her out. But still the worm of lust nags at her. Agnes is a complex heroine who wrestles with the demands of faith, lust and ambition. Maguire has taken a slim legend and turned it into a vibrant and forceful wonder. AS
Sceptre £16.99 pp320
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Greater Sins by Gabrielle Griffiths

In the Cabrach, an isolated community in rural Aberdeenshire, young men, including the local bigwig, William Calder, have been called up to serve in the Great War. His unhappy wife, Lizzie, has to do her bit by working on the land. It’s while doing this that she finds the body of an ancient woman preserved in the peat. Lizzie feels rather proprietorial about her and enlists Johnny, a farm hand and itinerant musician, to care for the bog woman.

However, the Cabrach being a superstitious place, some of the other farm workers become spooked by her presence. And the growing closeness of Johnny and Lizzie also sets the village talking, especially after the arrival of a newcomer who knows that Johnny was once called Jack and fled from some kind of trouble. The story set in 1915 is intercut with flashbacks to Lizzie’s unhappy marriage to William, who was not her first choice of husband, and to Johnny’s past. This is a striking and atmospheric debut. AS
Doubleday £16.99 pp352
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On Starlit Seas by Sara Sheridan

This novel about chocolate, love and travel was published in 2016. After the success of Sara Sheridan’s 2021 novel, The Fair Botanists, it has been revised and reissued. It is the fictionalised story of Maria Graham, a real travel writer from an age in which female travellers were a rarity.

As the novel opens, it is 1823 and Maria is trying to get back from South America to London. She ends up on the Peacock, captained by the fictional and rakish smuggler James Henderson, who is carrying a cargo of chocolate for a mysterious and sinister syndicate. The bluestocking and the adventurer are drawn to each other. Henderson desires respectability, but does not know the rules. Maria knows the
boundaries of polite society only too well — “You can be yourself up a mountain or even in a jungle, but when you reach civilisation a lady is expected to simper and take the long route.”

Back on dry land, both are in conflict with their circumstances. Maria wants to write, but ladies aren’t supposed to; Henderson wants to go straight, but the murderous owners of the cargo want to keep him crooked. This is a rich and gorgeous novel full of real life characters, from Maria to the Quaker family behind Fry chocolates, via the dashing naval hero, Lord Cochrane. AS
Hodder £9.99 pp352
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A Merciful Sea by Katie Daysh

Katie Daysh’s naval trilogy opened with Leeward and an explosion aboard the Lion at the Battle of the Nile that left Captain Hiram Nightingale deafened and bereft. Many adventures later, this concluding book in the series has Nightingale’s lover, Lieutenant Arthur Courtney, on board the Lion as it blockades the French fleet.

It is 1805, and Courtney’s captain, Henry Harrison, is one of Nelson’s commanders. But there is something amiss aboard the Lion. Discipline has broken down, the men are brawling unchecked and there is a strange atmosphere among the officers. Courtney struggles to make the Lion a more effective fighting ship, a matter of urgency as the French fleet hovers beyond the horizon.

In England, Nightingale has left the navy and is missing life at sea. His favourite place is the cottage on the Isle of Wight where he and Courtney have spent blissful shore leaves. But there begin to arrive threatening notes that could expose their clandestine relationship to a hostile world. As Nightingale investigates who is the author of these missives, he gets drawn into the plans to defend the island against a French invasion. A Merciful Sea builds to the climax of the Battle of Trafalgar, which Daysh handles with skill — the breathtaking audacity of Nelson’s battleplan means that Courtney and his Lions must brave terrible, raking fire. This is a fitting end to a wonderful trilogy. AS
Canelo Adventure £18.99 pp336
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• The hottest new reads for 2025, from romance to mysteries

The Mouthless Dead by Anthony Quinn

The Wallace case is one of the greatest puzzles in British criminal history. Did William Herbert Wallace, an unassuming insurance agent in 1930s Liverpool, kill his wife? He was tried, found guilty and sentenced to hang but was exonerated on appeal and released. In his latest novel Anthony Quinn has found an ingenious way of reshaping the story into a gripping work of fiction. On a transatlantic voyage years after the murder, a former police officer named Key, once involved in the case, discusses it with two fellow passengers — a young woman named Lydia, and Teddy, a would-be film-maker, who sees potential for a screenplay in Key’s recollections. As he talks, he reveals details that suggest a new explanation for this crime that Raymond Chandler once called the “the nonpareil of murder mysteries”. Could the enigmatic Key have more to tell? Quinn has produced a compelling mixture of crime story and character study. NR
Abacus £20 pp288
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The House of Barbary by Isabelle Schuler

Isabelle Schuler’s debut fiction, Lady MacBethad, was a powerful study of the medieval Scotswoman who became one of Shakespeare’s most famous female characters. The House of Barbary, her second novel, has the unusual setting of 17th-century Switzerland. Its leading protagonist is Beatrice Barbary, an educated young woman who, as the book begins, is mourning her murdered father, one of Berne’s leading citizens. He was over-protective of his daughter and, now he is gone, she is bereft. However, she senses that there are mysteries about him that need explanation and, in working to discover these, she unearths deeply unsettling secrets that threaten her future. Very loosely inspired by the myth of Bluebeard, this is a historical novel of exceptional vigour and originality. NR
Raven £16.99 pp368
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A Death in Berlin by Simon Scarrow

In Berlin in May 1940, Max Remer, boss of one of the city’s biggest crime gangs, is ambushed and shot dead. When Horst Schenke, a detective with the Kriminalpolizei, visits Remer’s nightclub to investigate, he becomes accidentally embroiled in a gunfight. A turf war between rival gangs has broken out. Schenke, not a fan of the Führer, must navigate a political minefield as his inquiries begin to ruffle important feathers. At the same time his relationship with a Jewish woman complicates his life. Novels set in Nazi Germany, in which a tarnished hero struggles to follow his own moral code amid the regime’s all-encompassing immorality, are not uncommon. The late Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther books come immediately to mind. Simon Scarrow is a less witty writer than Kerr was, but his own talents for lively characterisation and vividly described action are much in evidence in this enjoyable thriller. NR
Headline £22 pp400
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Murder Most Foul by Guy Jenkin

The iconoclastic playwright Christopher Marlowe has been found dead in Deptford and one of the first to stumble across the body is the rival dramatist William Shakespeare. Rumours begin to circulate London that the man from Stratford, jealous of Marlowe’s success, has killed him. Joining forces with the dead man’s feisty sister, Ann, a former lover, Will aims to discover the truth about the murder and clear his name. As other Londoners worry about the plague that has struck the city, Will and Ann enter a dangerous world of treachery, espionage and political ambition. Anyone seeking close historical accuracy in fiction should probably steer clear of Murder Most Foul. Cheerfully indifferent even to those (admittedly few) facts about Marlowe’s murder that are generally accepted, Guy Jenkin has created his own version of events in an energetic, often very funny tale of Elizabethan life and death. NR
Legend £9.99 pp288
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The Bishop’s Villa by Sacha Naspini, trans. Clarissa Botsford

In the winter of 1943 the locals in a small, nondescript town in Tuscany discover that the local bishop has leased his villa. It is to become a prison camp and will house local Jews, arrested and awaiting deportation to Germany. The townsfolk, including the cobbler René, are appalled and gather in the bar to gripe about it, helplessly. They ask themselves how such a thing could happen in Le Case, “a nowhere town lost in some nowhere mountains”. It is a cold winter and everyone is hungry, so most people avert their eyes from the horrors and concentrate on finding food and warmth.

Shy and reserved René, who lost seven of his fingers after a childhood accident, has only one friend — Anna, his neighbour downstairs, whom he quietly loves. After her son, a partisan, was shot by the Germans, she too joined the resistance. Rumour reaches René that Anna is being held prisoner in the Bishop’s Villa. René is driven to a great act of courage, “the first and only one in his life”.

René is the main character, but all the ordinary people depicted in this extraordinary novel wrestle with dilemmas similar to his. What responsibility do they have to act in the face of evil? Sacha Naspini’s exploration of this question is wise and tender, and René is an unusual, unforgettable hero. AS
Europa Editions £14.99 pp220
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The Woman in the Wallpaper by Lora Jones

After their father dies in an accident, two sisters, Sofi and Lara, find work in a factory outside Versailles that makes fancy wallpaper for the ancien régime. They form a bond with Josef Oberst, the owner’s son, who is particularly drawn to Lara, the prettier and quieter of the two. Lara becomes transfixed by images of a woman that recur in the Oberst wallpaper — maybe the rumours are true that the woman is Josef’s mother, who died in mysterious circumstances. But Lara also notices that the figure looks eerily like her. Sofi, meanwhile, is caught up in the revolutionary mood of France in 1789.

Sofi and Lara narrate this tale along with the spoilt, petulant and aristocratic Hortense who marries Josef and, because she has wed beneath her station, makes his life a misery. The secrets of the Oberst family begin to emerge. The sisters are told by their mother near the beginning of the book: “I’ve told you a thousand times haven’t I? Men are not to be trusted?” It’s a warning that turns out to be prophetic. A clever and absorbing gothic debut. AS
Sphere £18.99 pp512
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The Fires of Gallipoli by Barney Campbell

Two young officers meet on the way to Gallipoli. Diffident Edward Salter, a lawyer before the outbreak of war in 1914 and now a platoon commander, becomes friends with Theodore Thorne, a newcomer blessed with a natural ease and swagger. Before they reach Turkey, the CO has a photograph taken of the young officers.

Barney Campbell, a former soldier, does an incredible job of recreating the hellishness of the fighting at Gallipoli. The trenches are foetid, the weather is the enemy and the Turks are ferocious. It is gruelling stuff. Yet for the officers, there are moments of adrenaline-fuelled joy even as, one by one, the men in the photograph begin to fall.

The second half of the novel explores the legacy of living through something so horrific yet so vital. Salter’s Gallipoli hangover affects him in ways that he struggles to understand, and it has a devastating impact on his friendship with Thorne. A wonderful, unsentimental novel about male friendship in wartime. AS
Elliott & Thompson £18.99 pp320
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The Stolen Heart by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk

Ukraine’s most famous novelist returns with his second book about a detective in revolutionary Kyiv. Samson Kolechko is a police officer in a strange new world. He is astonished to discover that selling meat privately is now a crime, but nonetheless dutifully investigates a linchpin of Kyiv’s underground meat scene. Meanwhile, his live-in friend and romantic target Nadezhda is carrying out a census of the railways. But Ukraine’s railwaymen have created their own state within a revolutionary state and resent being asked questions. When Nadezhda is kidnapped, Samson has to track her down, all the while dealing with the Cheka secret police and the Red Army.

The first novel in the series was The Silver Bone. Start there. The Stolen Heart is not a stand-alone; there are recurring stories in this highly satisfying sequel. One-eared Samson is an endearing guide to the vividly recreated Kyiv. The novel’s surreal, black humour is an ideal lens through which to view the absurdities of living in a Bolshevik paradise in which Leon Trotsky wants to erect a giant statue of Judas Iscariot and police officers enforce barmy laws that change overnight. AS
MacLehose £20 pp320
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The Blackbirds of St Giles by Lila Cain

Daniel Fitzallen, a former slave and soldier in the American War of Independence, arrives in London in 1782 with his young sister, Pearl, expecting to inherit an estate from their late benefactor, a British army officer who took them under his wing. Instead he is cheated out of his due by the officer’s villainous brother and thrown on to the unforgiving streets of St Giles, one of the city’s worst slums. The siblings’ only shelter lies in a criminal underworld ruled over by the ruthless Elias. Forced unwillingly into the role of prizefighter, Daniel glimpses a chance to free himself and Pearl from Elias’s clutches, and to become a champion of his fellow black Londoners. Lila Cain is a pseudonym for two writers who together have constructed what proves, despite occasional lapses into melodrama, a memorable and thoroughly entertaining narrative. NR
Simon & Schuster £18.99 pp496
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The Unrecovered by Richard Strachan

In the final year of the First World War, Esther Worrell, widowed after a brief, unsatisfactory marriage, is working as a nurse in a military hospital on the Scottish coast. Looming over the hospital is the crumbling castle of Gallondean, where the consumptive Jacob Beresford, a young man recently returned from India, has taken up residence. Esther and Jacob have demons to exorcise but they are drawn to one another. Jacob becomes obsessed by the local legend of a ghostly hound that howls in the night whenever a laird of Gallondean approaches death; Esther struggles with memories of her late, largely unlamented husband, a drunkard who was scornful of her ambition to become a poet. In Richard Strachan’s impressive first novel, the lives of his characters are radically changed not only by the war but by the eruption of the past into the present. NR
Raven £16.99 pp304
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• The 10 best historical fiction books of 2024

The Kings Head by Kelly Frost

In 1950s London, the Kings, a girl gang named after the pub where they congregate, roam Finsbury Park streets still scarred by wartime bombs. Their leader, Harry, has just returned from a short stay in Holloway prison to discover their turf is under threat from incursion by rivals. Believing in the maxim that attack is the best form of defence, Harry arranges for the Kings to take the battle to the enemy. In dancehalls and amid the rubble of bombsites, flick knives flash and fists fly as Harry’s followers protect their territory, but the world is changing around them in ways they cannot control. Kelly Frost has chosen an original milieu for her debut novel. The King’s Head is not only a compelling story but also an understated celebration of female friendship and a lament for its alterations with time. NR
Atlantic £16.99 pp304
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Even Beyond Death by Fiona Melrose

The year is 1657 and the place is Avignon in Provence. The Marquis Jehan Beaudelaire is a man apparently favoured by fortune. However, beneath his elegant, arrogant surface, he is plagued by melancholy and the potentially dangerous awareness that he is sexually attracted to men. He encounters Jonathan Kryk when the handsome Dutchman unexpectedly assists him in cheating during a game of real tennis. Kryk becomes his valet and Jehan experiences a coup de foudre when he observes his new servant in tears, moved by a music concert. Can his love for Kryk offer the means to escape the impossible demands that his social status makes and give him what his mind and body want? Knowing and witty, Fiona Melrose’s third novel uses an ingenious narrative conceit to allow Jehan to tell the story of his passion “even beyond death”. NR
Corsair £22 pp400
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•

The Artist by Lucy Steeds

In a Provencal village in 1920, the irascible artist Eduoard Tartuffe lives in grouchy isolation with his niece, Ettie, who quietly skivvies for him. Their peace is interrupted by a young Englishman, Joseph Adelaide, an aspiring journalist and art school drop-out who arrives at the remote house to interview Tartuffe. He is only permitted to stay because Tartuffe wants to use him as a model for a long-planned painting, Young Man with Orange. Joseph hero-worships Tartuffe, writing gushing articles for his editor in London about the Master of Light.

At first, Joseph does not notice Ettie, who sees him as “a pale boy undone by art”. As the summer rolls on, hot and heavy, they grow closer and Joseph begins to see the tyrannical, capricious, demanding Tartuffe more clearly. Can he love the art but not the artist? And other emotions are flowing through the claustrophobic house — Ettie has her own secrets and Joseph, estranged from his family, is grappling with the legacy of the recent war; he was a conscientious objector while his brother never came back from fighting. The Artist is a lush, impressive debut; the writing is rich and sensuous, especially in descriptions of food, the landscape and the act of creation. Lucy Steeds, a graduate of the Faber Academy, is one to watch. AS
John Murray £16.99 pp304
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The Lotus Shoes by Jane Yang

Little Flower’s mother, in an act of love, has forcibly broken the bones in her daughter’s feet over and over again to create “golden lilies”, the tiny feet that denote women of high status. But despite her bound feet, Little Flower’s family is poor and she is sold into domestic servitude, working for the Fong family. Her new mistress, Linjing, is a girl her own age. Little Flower has to learn to survive in the Fong household, which is particularly hard because Linjing is jealous of her and their relationship is riddled with spite and mistrust. A scandal brings the Fong family low, and the adult Linjing and Little Flower are forced to make a life outside the order of the household.

The first half of the Lotus Shoes is mesmerising. Jane Yang masterfully creates this 19th-century lost world with the complicated customs that rule women’s lives. In the weaker second half, as the two women attempt to create their own destinies, the story is marred by clunking anachronisms — the characters say things like: “I needed him to see the destructive nature of societal pressure.” Luckily, we care enough about Little Flower and Linjing’s fates to follow them through to its satisfying end. AS
Sphere £20 pp400
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The Queen of Fives by Alex Hay

Quinn Le Blanc is the Queen of Fives, a conwoman and swindler in late Victorian London. She lives with her accomplice, Silk, in a house called the Château where other Queens before her have ruled and plotted and swindled. But the Château has fallen on hard times and Quinn decides to risk all on an audacious plan to seduce a duke and rob him of his vast fortune. The mark for her scheme is the head of the fabulously rich and distinctly odd Kendal family. But as Quinn moves in on the duke, there are other eyes watching her. Someone has a score to settle against the Queen of Fives.

There are mysteries piled upon enigmas in this rollicking tale by Alex Hay. The Queen of Fives is similar to his 2023 debut, The Housekeepers, another clever historical heist novel about a con artist — Hay keeps the pages turning and the reader guessing. Great fun. AS
Headline Review £18.99 pp416
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The Quick and the Dead by Emma Hinds

Kit Skevy is an orphan living on his wits in late 16th-century Southwark. His unusual trait — he does not feel pain — means that he becomes one of the area’s best brawlers. With his best friend, Mariner, a female sailor who dresses as a boy, he goes to work for Will Twentyman, a vicious gang lord. Twentyman sends Kit and Mariner to rob a grave, but everything goes wrong and Kit’s hands are set on fire by a mysterious black substance. Kit is kidnapped by an alchemist called Lord Isherwood, who is looking for the secret of Dark Fire. Mariner seeks help from a rival to Isherwood, the mysterious Lady Blackwater. The two Southwark chancers are drawn into a deep game of alchemy and magic. An exuberant novel for fans of the gothic and the unlikely. AS
Bedford Square £16.99 pp368
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The Players by Minette Walters

Still best known for the contemporary crime novels she wrote earlier in her career, Minette Walters has more recently turned to the past with great success. Her new work is set in the aftermath of the failed 1685 Monmouth Rebellion when the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, eldest illegitimate son of Charles II, attempted to depose his uncle, the Catholic James II. The duke is captured and executed. His followers, mostly misguided peasants, are faced with murderous repression from the brutal Judge Jeffreys.

A former army comrade of Monmouth’s, Elias, Duke of Granville, and his formidable mother see nothing but injustice in this. Aided by an unlikely group of associates, including a lawyer’s intellectual daughter, who is in a wheelchair, they attempt to save as many as they can from James’s revenge and Jeffreys’s cruelty. Walters gives readers a sweeping narrative and a host of memorable characters in a novel that shows her to be as skilled in historical fiction as she is in the crime genre. NR
Allen & Unwin £20 pp496
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The Life of Herod the Great by Zora Neale Hurston

The author of Their Eyes Were Watching God and a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Zora Neale Hurston died in 1960. It has taken more than six decades for her final, unfinished novel to be published, edited by the scholar Deborah G Plant, and it turns out to be a strange but intriguing biographical tale about the man vilified in Christian history as the instigator of the Massacre of the Innocents.

Arguing that she wanted readers to “be better acquainted with the real, the historical Herod, instead of the deliberately folklore Herod”, Hurston produced this lively portrait of a man caught between two worlds — a Judean king in a time of war and Roman imperial expansion. NR
HQ £20 pp368
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The Serpent Under by Bonnie MacBird

There has been no shortage of Sherlock Holmes pastiches over the decades, but some of the finest new adventures featuring Conan Doyle’s great detective recently have been those written by Bonnie MacBird. This one begins, as all good Holmes stories should, in the “cosy confines” of 221B Baker Street. Holmes and Watson are summoned to Windsor Castle where a young woman in the royal household has been found murdered, with mysterious tattoos carved into her face. They are also drawn into the mystery surrounding the drowning in the Serpentine of one of the Baker Street Irregulars, the detective’s band of street urchin intelligence gatherers.

Combining a convincing imitation of Watson’s narrative style with a labyrinthine plot for Holmes to navigate, MacBird’s sixth excursion into Victorian London is a treat for all Sherlockians. NR
Collins Crime Club £16.99 pp384
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To Save the Man by John Sayles

“Kill the Indian in him and save the man” was the expressed aim of Richard Henry Pratt in establishing his Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania in 1879. Only by assimilating to white culture and leaving their own behind, he believed, could Native Americans survive. This latest novel by the writer and film director John Sayles is set mostly at Carlisle in 1890 where boys and girls from different native peoples, many with no initial knowledge of the English language, struggle to make sense of their new surroundings. Some choose to rebel. Rumours reach them of the “ghost dance” movement, which has provided new hope in their home reservations, and then of the Wounded Knee Massacre, which has dashed those hopes.

In Sayles’s fascinating, sometimes unecessarily fragmentary narrative, one of Pratt’s prize pupils decides he must desert the school and discover for himself what is happening. NR
Melville House £25 pp352
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