A family story retold by the descendent of one of the victims of the Salem Witch trials, this follows the story of the Carrier family, capturing the social and political milieu which fostered the conditions for witch hunting mania. The language is passionate and evocative, told through the eyes of the ten year old daughter …
Tag: historical fiction
The Girl Who Fell From The Sky – Simon Mawer
During World War II, Britain sent spies into Occupied France, many of whom were women. This book tells the story of what that experience would have been like. Marian Sutro has fled to England with her parents and brother, and finds herself selected, as a French speaker, to go undercover to France to assist …
Continue reading The Girl Who Fell From The Sky – Simon Mawer
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows
A novel in letters, the sole novel by Mary Ann Shaffer and completed and published posthumously by her relative, Annie Barrows. In tone, it’s very much like the letters between the Mitford sisters, and is by turns funny, delightful, tragic and touching. It follows protagonist Juliet, a writer, who receives a letter from a man …
The Confectioner’s Tale – Laura Madeleine
After reading my first Patrick White, I reached for a book with a pretty cover and a romantic storyline. The Confectioners Tale is a sweet story of romance, cake and Paris just before the war, and a university student in England who finds a photograph in her recently deceased Grandfathers things with a note begging …
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
I think what strikes you first about de Bernieres is how human is writing is. It's mundane, describes the ordinary, or perhaps ordinary people caught up in history, in change. While war wages around the sleeping, pastoral island of Cephallonia, for example, goats must still be milked, fathers scolded and meals shared, distant politics debated, …
Continue reading Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick
Everything is covered in cold, white snow in this novel of family trauma and intrigue in 1908 Wisconsin. Goolrick was inspired to write this book after coming across Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip, a photographic collection of residents of this area in the early 1900's with stories from records and newspapers of the subject's stories. …
The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom
A seven year old girl from Ireland lands on US soil in 1791 as an indentured servant. Taken to a plantation in Virginia, she is cared for by the owners illegitimate daughter by a slave girl, called Belle, and slowly builds a home and a life amongst the black slaves. But as she grows up, …
The Vanishing Witch by Karen Maitland
Set in the 1300's, a beautiful, wealthy widow comes to the small town of Lincoln with her children, shadowed by a mysterious one-handed man. When she starts up a friendship with a wealthy merchant, she soon worms her way into his heart, and as his wife starts to sicken, tongues start to wag. Is this woman using …
CravenWild 