To celebrate the publication (on 20 January) of The Queen’s Lady by Joanna Hickson, Historia is giving five winners copies of both novels in her Queens of the Tower series to five winners. The first, Lady of the Ravens, came out a year ago. The giveaway is open until 11.59pm on 1 February, 2022. Each of […]
Joan Vaux – child prodigy and lady-in-waiting to four queens
Joanna Hickson writes about the unusual life of Joan Vaux, child prodigy, second-generation immigrant, champion of the Tower ravens and lady-in-waiting to four queens, who is the subject of her latest novel, The Queen’s Lady. When I was researching the history of Joan Vaux I very quickly realised that her character and life were too […]
Review: Sherlock Holmes and the Rosetta Stone Mystery by Linda Stratmann
Sherlock Holmes and the Rosetta Stone Mystery is the first of Linda Stratmann‘s novels following the consulting detective in the making. Tom Williams, author of the Napoleonic era-set James Burke adventures and the darker John Williamson books, finds it “rather wonderful”. The world is full of Sherlock Holmes pastiches. Most of them, to be honest, […]
Asylums and prisons: locking women away in madhouses
Nicola Pryce tells Historia about the historical background to her latest novel, which touches on various kinds of imprisonment; the most shocking is the 18th-century practice of locking inconvenient women away in madhouses, as she explains. The Cornish Captive is the sixth novel in my Cornish series. My heroine is mentioned before in passing but […]
Historia interviews: 2021 Gold Crown Award winner Chris Lloyd
Chris Lloyd won the HWA Gold Crown Award in 2021 for The Unwanted Dead, a tense thriller set in Paris at the start of the Nazi occupation in 1940. Detective Eddie Giral, still traumatised by his experiences during the First World War, is helpless in the face of this menace. There’s one thing he still […]
Historia giveaway! HWA Gold Crown Award 2021 shortlist
Historia’s running three HWA Crowns giveaways to celebrate the books shortlisted for the 2021 Crown Awards. This final one is for all six books on the Gold Crown shortlist. The Historia Gold Crown 2021 giveaway is open until 11.59pm on 15 January, 2022. The two winners will each receive all six books in the 2021 […]
Historical books to look out for in 2022
Our popular annual list of books to look out for during the year is back for 2022, with history, biography and historical fiction. Here are books to read from HWA authors covering eras from Ancient Rome to the 1980s and sweeping across continents from China to Russia and India, the USA to Australia and the […]
Oliver Cromwell’s war on Christmas?
Probably the one thing that most people could tell you about Oliver Cromwell (other that that he had warts) was that he banned Christmas. It is a ‘fact’ that is often referenced today, with comparisons being made to modern restrictions on festivities due to Covid-19. Is it true though? Stuart Orme, curator of the Cromwell […]