Testament is a gorgeously written re-telling of the story of Jesus of Nazareth — not the story of the divine Son of God, but of a compelling and complex human being in first-century Galilee. The story is told in four parts from the perspective of four different characters — Judas Iscariot, Mary Magdalene, Mary [...]
In my endless quest for good Biblical fiction I picked up this novel about a Biblical character I haven’t read a book about before: the Samaritan woman who meets Jesus at the well in John, chapter 4. On the one hand, the author seems to have had her work cut out for her in [...]
Despite all the good things I’d heard about Atonement, I hadn’t read the book before going to see the movie the other night. In fact, I’d decided not to read the book before seeing the movie, because I’d heard people who loved the book say they were disappointed with the movie. To avoid disappointment, I [...]
I think it’s official — I am going to have to admit Jude Morgan to my elite Pantheon of Historical Fiction authors. Which creates some gender issues, because it used to be the Pantheon of Historical Fiction Goddesses, but I’m just going to have to work around that.
Symphony is the kind of book I love [...]
Here’s another book I read as a young adult that had a huge impact on my view of life and particularly of love. It’s also one of the very few novels by a male author that has remained a favourite over the years. I read it first as a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book — yes, [...]
Originally published in French as Jeanne, Fille du Roi, this is another work of young-adult historical fiction I’ve loved for years, although I was older when I read this one — probably 19 or 20. It’s aimed at teenaged readers, but I enjoyed rereading it just as much as I enjoyed it the first [...]
Mistress Malapert probably wasn’t the first work of historical fiction I read, but it was certainly the book that made me fall in love with the genre. It’s the story of the headstrong and selfish Valerie, who disguises herself as a boy and runs away from a harsh guardian in Elizabethan England. [...]
Many years ago, in what seems like another lifetime, I did an MA in English and wrote my thesis on Audrey Thomas. Just in case you were wondering, the thesis was called Mother Tongues: Language and Maternity in the Fictions of Audrey Thomas, and one of the eight zillion things I disagreed with my [...]
Nectar from a Stone is set in medieval Wales, in the era of the Black Death. The plague is a menacing presence that looms in the background of the story, influencing the characters and all they do. The main character is Elise, a reluctant wife to the boorish and abusive Maelgwyn. When [...]
Unlike the last book I reviewed, Conceit, to which I brought a lot of preconceived notions, Passion took me by surprise. In many ways.
It has some similarities to Conceit, and indeed to my own novel The Violent Friendship of Esther Johnson, in that it’s about a women who are known to history mainly because [...]
