Tag: historical fiction

#BookReview The Merchant’s Dilemma by Carolyn Hughes @writingcalliope

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About the Book

Winchester, 1362. Seven months ago, accused of bringing plague and death from Winchester, Bea Ward was hounded out of Meonbridge by her former friends and neighbours. Finding food and shelter where she could, she struggled to make her way back to Winchester again.

Yet, once she arrived, she wondered why she’d come.

For her former lover – the love of her life – Riccardo Marchaunt, had married a year ago. And she no longer had the strength to go back to her old life on the streets. Frail, destitute and homeless, she was reduced to begging. Then, in January, during a tumultuous and destructive storm, she found herself on Riccardo’s doorstep. She had no plan, beyond hoping he might help her, or at least provide a final resting place for her poor body.

When Bea awakes to find she’s lying in Riccardo’s bed once more, she’s thankful, thrilled, but mystified. But she soon learns that his wife died four months ago, along with their newborn son, and finds too that Riccardo loves her now as much as he ever did, and wants to make her his wife. But can he? And, even if he can, could she ever really be a proper merchant’s wife?

Riccardo could not have been more relieved to find Bea still alive, when he thought he had lost her forever. She had been close to death, but is now recovering her health. He adores her and wants her to be his wife. But how? His father would forbid such an “unfitting” match, on pain of denying him his inheritance. And what would his fellow merchants think of it? And their haughty wives?

Yet, Riccardo is determined that Bea will be his wife. He has to find a solution to his dilemma… With the help of his beloved mother, Emilia, and her close friend, Cecily, he hatches a plan to make it happen.

But even the best laid plans sometimes go awry. And the path of love never did run smooth…

Format: ebook (232 pages) Publisher: Riverdown Books
Publication date: 21st September 2023 Genre: Historical Fiction, Romance

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My Review

Carolyn Hughes describes The Merchant’s Dilemma as a ‘companion novel’ to her historical fiction series, ‘The Meonbridge Chronicles’, set in a small village in 14th century Hampshire. For those who’ve read previous books in the series, The Merchant’s Dilemma continues the story of two characters, Beatrix and Riccardo, who featured in the fourth book, Children’s Fate. However, it can easily be read as a standalone as there are plenty of references to prior events in the lives of Beatrix and Riccardo, meaning it would also be the ideal introduction to the author’s books.

As Carolyn admits, The Merchant’s Dilemma is a little more romantic and light-hearted than other books in the series and, being set in Winchester, it doesn’t immerse you in medieval life in quite the same way as the books set in Meonbridge so wonderfully do. In fact, its storyline involving romance between people of different classes could have come right out of Jane Austen.

Although Riccardo’s dilemma is understandable given his position in society and Bea’s past, it was Bea’s patience that I admired most. At every turn a new obstacle seems to be placed in the way of her becoming Riccardo’s wife, and even when one is removed another seemingly takes its place. Enter two brilliant characters: Riccardo’s mother, Emilia, and Emilia’s friend, Cecily. Together they embark on a plan to convince Winchester society that Beatrix is a suitable potential wife for Riccardo, training her on how to behave. With shades of Pygmalion, Beatrix must become Beatrice, learning to appear demure in public and only able to let her hair down – literally – in private.

I never doubted Riccardo’s love for Beatrix, even if he does appear obstinate and overly timid, testing her patience to the limit. The reader’s too, I suspect.

Luckily for Riccardo, Emilia and Cecily take charge of the situation given that he, his brother Giacomo and their former drinking buddies are making a right old mess of things with rumours starting to spread about the true nature of Beatrix’s past. The flames are fanned by Sarah, Giacomo’s harridan of a wife, who likes to think herself superior to everyone else but enjoys nothing better than trading the latest scurrilous gossip. Eventually even Riccardo is the subject of a dangerous slander.

After many trials and tribulations, The Merchant’s Dilemma concludes in the way all romances should, leaving the reader with a smile and a warm feeling inside.

I received a digital review copy courtesy of the author.

In three words: Engaging, lively, romantic

About the Author

Carolyn Hughes has lived much of her life in Hampshire. With a first degree in Classics and English, she started working life as a computer programmer, then a very new profession. But it was technical authoring that later proved her vocation, word-smithing for many different clients, including banks, an international hotel group and medical instrument manufacturers.

Although she wrote creatively on and off for most of her adult life, it was not until her children flew the nest that writing historical fiction took centre stage.

Carolyn has a Masters in Creative Writing from Portsmouth University and a PhD from the University of Southampton. 

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#BookReview North Woods by Daniel Mason @johnmurrays

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About the Book

FOUR CENTURIES. A SINGLE HOUSE DEEP IN THE WOODS OF NEW ENGLAND.

A young Puritan couple on the run. An English soldier with a fantastic vision. Inseparable twin sisters. A lovelorn painter and a lusty beetle. A desperate mother and her haunted son. A ruthless con man and a stalking panther. Buried secrets. Madness, dreams and hope.

All are connected. The dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

Format: eARC (384 pages) Publisher: John Murray Press
Publication date: 19th September 2023 Genre: Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

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My Review

I loved the first book by Daniel Mason I read, The Winter Soldier, an emotional and beautifully written novel set in the First World War that I had no hesitation in awarding five stars. The same was true of his next book, A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, a collection of short stories whose subtle links and recurring themes become more apparent as you read the book. In my review, I described it as ‘a tour de force of imagination’ and I have no hesitation in applying the same description to North Woods.

Starting in the 17th century and centred around a remote house and the surrounding north woods, events unfold in a series of episodes told in a variety of styles including a testimony, a newspaper report, a lecture, an exchange of correspondence, a poem, a song. Over time, the house is a place of passion, violence, refuge, contentment, simmering resentment, mental distress and trickery. It’s extended, damaged by storms, left to become derelict, abandoned and then rediscovered. The people that have inhabited it have each left a mark on it, sometimes incorporeal in nature, adding an intriguing supernatural element.

The connections the author weaves between the episodes and the various characters are immensely clever and skilfully done. Some of the links are obvious, some less so, meaning it might only be the mention of an object – an old hat of felted beaver – or a name – Osgood – that makes you recall an earlier story. The book is akin to a patchwork quilt made up of squares created by people of different generations and different skill levels, sewn together in random fashion but with some recurring motifs. As I was reading the book, my constant thought was ‘this is my favourite’, only for it to be replaced by another almost immediately afterwards.

The events in the lives of the characters are often intensely moving but there are also elements of humour, eccentricity and melodrama. And the book doesn’t just feature human characters but also animal and insect life – that ‘lusty beetle’ mentioned in the blurb – even fungal diseases.

The writing is beautiful with the author adopting a variety of styles that wonderfully bring to life the events of each episode. I’m a great fan of a list and there are some brilliantly quirky ones in the book, often almost poetic in style, such as this description of the items making up the ballast of a ship bound for America, demonstrating it’s not only humans who migrate.

‘There are stones and loam and sand, insects and earthworms, bird bones and crushed snail shells, roly-polies, and tuffs of grass that wilt within the darkness of the hold. There is a half-decayed mole, and a live one, broken jugs, a Roman coin that will be rediscovered by a young boy walking on the shoreline 317 years later, and another, a “crown of the double rose” bearing an image of Edward VI on horseback, that will sift down into the silty depths of Massachusetts Bay and disappear forever. There is a beaded necklace dropped by a longshoreman’s wife during a moment of indiscretion, a splintered lens from a bookkeeper’s spectacles, stray curls blown from the barber’s market stall by an offshore breeze, peach pits, rotting broadsheets of forgotten songs. And there are seeds, uncountable, scattered in the humid load: red clover, groundsel, spurrey, trefoil, meadow fescue, dandelion, hedge parsley, nonesuch, plantains.’

The depiction of nature is mesmerising charting the changing of the seasons and the transformation of the woods over time. In fact, the woods are a character in themselves acting amongst other things as a sanctuary, a meeting place, a source of inspiration, a habitation, a hiding place and a harbinger of environmental change.

I thought North Woods was absolutely brilliant. It’s definitely one of the best books I’ve read this year.

I received a digital review copy courtesy of John Murray Press via NetGalley.

In three words: Magical, imaginative, moving

About the Author

Daniel Mason is the author of The Piano Tuner (2002), A Far Country (2007), The Winter Soldier  (2018), A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (2020), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  His work has been translated into 28 languages, adapted for opera and stage, and awarded a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.  His short stories and essays have been awarded two Pushcart Prizes, a National Magazine Award, and an O. Henry Prize. He is an assistant professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry. (Photo: Goodreads author page)

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