As a nation we are obsessed with property: prices, interior design and restoration, and the creation of a home. Now there is another avenue to explore: the history of your house. In this updated second edition, Britain’s leading house historian uncovers the hidden stories and secrets of ordinary and extraordinary homes across the country. Gain […]
Blood’s Revolution by Angus Donald
It’s 1685 and after the victory of Sedgemoor by King James II’s men and the Bloody Assizes that followed, the British Isles face an uneasy time. Many powerful men have grown tired of Catholic James’s autocratic rule and seek to invite William, the Protestant Prince of Orange, to seize the thrones of the Three Kingdoms. […]
King of Kings by Wilbur Smith and Imogen Robertson
Cairo, 1887. A beautiful September day. Penrod Ballantyne and his fiancée, Amber Benbrook, stroll hand in hand. The future is theirs for the taking. But when Penrod’s jealous former lover, Lady Agatha, plants doubt about his character, Amber leaves him and travels to the wilds of Abyssinia with her twin sister, Saffron, and Saffron’s adventurer […]
Blackberry and Wild Rose by Sonia Velton
When Esther Thorel, the wife of a Huguenot silk-weaver, rescues Sara Kemp from a brothel she thinks she is doing God’s will. Sara is not convinced being a maid is better than being a whore, but the chance to escape her grasping ‘madam’ is too good to refuse. Inside the Thorels’ tall house in Spitalfields, […]
The Familiars by Stacey Halls
Fleetwood Shuttleworth is 17 years old, married, and pregnant for the fourth time. But as the mistress at Gawthorpe Hall, she still has no living child, and her husband Richard is anxious for an heir. When Fleetwood finds a letter she isn’t supposed to read from the doctor who delivered her third stillbirth, she is […]
The Hidden by Mary Chamberlain
Dora Simon and Joe O’Cleary live in separate countries, accepting of their twilight years. But their monochrome worlds are abruptly upended by the arrival of Barbara Hummel, who is determined to identify the mysterious woman whose photograph she has found among her mother s possessions. Forced to confront a time they thought buried in the […]
Review: The Hidden by Mary Chamberlain
Mary Chamberlain’s latest novel is The Hidden, which focuses on the German occupation of the Channel Islands during the Second World War. Duncan Barrett reviews her “taut and troubling” book. In 2016, I spent three months in the Channel Islands, interviewing more than a hundred men and women who lived through the German Occupation during […]
Dark Water by Elizabeth Lowry
Dark Water, Elizabeth Lowry’s dark psychological novel set in the early 19th century