My Week in Books – 10th March 2024 – What Cathy Read Next…

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Monday – I shared my Top 5 February Reads.

Tuesday – I strayed from this week’s official Top Ten Tuesday topic instead sharing a list of the Ten Oldest Books in my TBR Pile.

Wednesday – As always WWW Wednesday is a weekly opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next… and to take a peek at what others are reading.

Thursday – Slowly working my way my oldest review copies, I published my review of historical mystery, The Madras Miasma by Brian Stoddart.

Saturday – I published my review of Perfume River by Robert Olen Butler.

New arrivals

A book on the longlist for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2024, an ARC and two non-fiction purchases.

The Fraud by Zadie Smith (Hamish Hamilton) Longlisted for The Walter Scott Prize 2024

It is 1873. Mrs Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper – and cousin by marriage – of a once famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years.

Mrs Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.

Andrew Bogle meanwhile grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realise. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story.

The ‘Tichborne Trial’ captivates Mrs Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task…

The Small Museum by Jody Cooksley (eARC, Allison & Busby via NetGalley)

London, 1873. Madeleine Brewster’s marriage to Dr Lucius Everley was meant to be the solution to her family’s sullied reputation. After all, Lucius is a well-respected collector of natural curiosities, his ‘Small Museum’ of bones and things in jars is his pride and joy, although kept under lock and key. His sister Grace’s philanthropic work with fallen women is also highly laudable. However, Maddie is confused by and excluded from what happens in what is meant to be her new home.

Maddie’s skill at drawing promises a role for her though when Lucius agrees to let her help him in making a breakthrough in evolutionary science, a discovery of the first ‘fish with feet’. But the more Maddie learns about both Lucius and Grace, the more she suspects that unimaginable horrors lie behind their polished reputations. Framed for a crime that would take her to the gallows and leave the Everleys unencumbered, Maddie’s only hope is her friend Caroline Fairly. But will she be able to put the pieces together before the trial reaches its fatal conclusion?

The Wager by David Grann (Simon & Schuster)

1742: A ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washes up on the coast of Brazil. Inside are thirty emaciated men, barely alive. Survivors from the Wager, a British vessel wrecked while on a secret mission to raid a Spanish treasure-filled galleon, they have an extraordinary story to tell.

Six months later, an even more decrepit boat comes ashore on the coast of Chile, containing just three castaways with their own, very different account of what happened. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil, they maintain, were not heroes – they were mutineers.

As accusations of treachery and murder fly, who is telling the truth? The stakes are life-and-death — for whoever is guilty could hang.

James and John: A True Story of Prejudice and Murder by Chris Bryant (Bloomsbury)

They had nothing to expect from the mercy of the crown; their doom was sealed; no plea could be urged in extenuation of their crime, and they well knew that for them there was no hope in this world.

When Charles Dickens penned these words in 1835 after visiting the infamous Newgate Prison, where seventeen men who had been sentenced to death were awaiting news of their pleas for mercy. Two men stood out: James Pratt and John Smith, who had been convicted of the ‘unnatural offense’ of ‘s-d-my’, a crime so unmentionable it was never named. That was why they alone despaired and, as the turnkey told Dickens, why they alone were ‘dead men’.

The 1830s ushered in great social reform in Britain. In a few short years the government swept away slavery, rotten boroughs, child labour, bribery and corruption in elections, the ban on trade unions and civil marriage. They also curtailed the ‘bloody code’ that treated 200 petty crimes as capital offences. Some thought the death penalty itself was wrong; there had not been a hanging at Newgate for two years. Yet when the King met with his ‘hanging’ Cabinet, they decided to reprieve all bar two men. When James and John were sent to the gallows in November 1935, they became the last men in England to be executed for being gay. Why were they alone not spared?

In this masterful work, Chris Bryant delves deep into the archives to recreate the lives of two men whose names are known to history – but whose story has been lost, until now.