Who were the Warenne Earls of Surrey? As good as forgotten now, for 300 years they were at the heart of English history, as medieval historian and novelist John Paul Davis learned when reading Defenders of the Norman Crown, Sharon Bennett Connolly’s history of the once-prominent family. He reviews it for Historia. Defenders of the […]
Reviews
Looking for your next read? HWA members review the best new historical writing, recommend their desert island books and revisit some old favourites.
Review: The Forgotten by Mary Chamberlain
Sarah Day reviews Mary Chamberlain’s new novel, The Forgotten, a “compelling mystery” set in Berlin in 1945 and London in the late 1950s. Most of us encounter the history of the Second World War at some point in the school curriculum. I remember learning about the rise of Nazism, the horrors of the Holocaust, the […]
Review: The Good Death by SD Sykes
Catherine Hokin reviews The Good Death by SD Sykes and finds it “a book to get lost in” and a story for our times. The Good Death is the fifth book in SD Sykes’s 14th-century Oswald de Lacy series of which I have been a fan since book one. I remain a staunch fan with […]
Review: The White Rajah by Tom Williams
Author Deborah Swift embarks on an adventure in the South China Seas to review Tom Williams’s reissued novel, The White Rajah, and finds much to enjoy. I’d never heard of James Brooke before reading Tom Williams’s excellent biographical novel, so I have been educated as well as entertained. Set at the beginning of the 19th […]
Review: Fortune’s Soldier by Alex Rutherford
Novelist and historian Richard Hopton reviews Alex Rutherford’s latest novel, Fortune’s Soldier, for Historia. Fortune’s Soldier is Alex Rutherford’s latest Indian historical epic, a successor to the Empire of the Moghul sextet. Set in the years between 1744 and 1757, it takes on a controversial period in Indian history. For old-fashioned British imperialists it represents […]
Review: The Prophet by Martine Bailey
Martine Bailey’s latest novel The Prophet is a sequel to 2019’s The Almanack and is another beautifully crafted story balanced on the cusp of the old world and the new, writes Catherine Hokin. The Almanack took place in 1752 against a backdrop of the transition from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar and the ‘lost […]
Review: The Lifeline by Deborah Swift
Tom Williams reviews The Lifeline by Deborah Swift, an adventure story with a dash of romance set in German-occupied Norway during a lesser-known episode of resistance to Nazi rule. Deborah Swift’s latest continues the Second World War theme of her latest books. We’re in German-occupied Norway in 1942. We are thrown into the action practically […]
Review: A Prince and a Spy by Rory Clements
Author Carolyn Kirby reviews A Prince and A Spy by Rory Clements, the fifth novel in his Tom Wilde series of thrillers set before and during the Second World War. When it comes to historical accuracy, Kate Atkinson says of her novel Transcription (2018) that the story was created through “…a wrenching apart of history […]