Tag: WalterScottPrize

Book Review – Tombland by C. J. Sansom

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About the Book

Spring, 1549. Two years after the death of Henry VIII, England is sliding into chaos.

The nominal king, Edward VI, is 11 years old. His uncle, Edward Seymour, Lord Hertford, rules as Edward’s regent and Protector. In the kingdom, radical Protestants are driving the old religion into extinction, while the Protector’s prolonged war with Scotland has led to hyperinflation and economic collapse. Rebellion is stirring among the peasantry.

Matthew Shardlake has been working as a lawyer in the service of Henry’s younger daughter, the lady Elizabeth. The gruesome murder of one of Elizabeth’s distant relations, rumored to be politically murdered, draws Shardlake and his companion Nicholas to the lady’s summer estate, where a second murder is committed.

As the kingdom explodes into rebellion, Nicholas is imprisoned for his loyalty, and Shardlake must decide where his loyalties lie – with his kingdom, or with his lady?

Format: Audiobook (37h 41m) Publisher: Mantle
Publication date: 18th October 2018 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

I’ve been trying to read all the books longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction since I first started following the prize in 2017. This, the seventh book in the author’s Matthew Shardlake series, was longlisted in 2019.

It’s taken me a long time to get around to reading Tombland, not least because it’s a whopper. I listened to the audiobook which would take you three days to complete if you did it continuously. Needless to say I didn’t, so it took me more like three weeks. The Matthew Shardlake series is one of the few series where I’ve read all the books and – crucially – in the right order, starting back in 2013 with Dissolution. Having said that, it’s coming up for ten years since I read the previous book in the series, Lamentation, and it’s the first time I’ve consumed one as an audiobook. (Although very good, I did find Steven Crossley’s narration on the slow side so chose to increase the reading speed.)

The book starts off as a crime mystery with Shardlake tasked by Henry VIII’s younger daughter, the Lady Elizabeth, to investigate the gruesome murder of Edith, the wife of John Boleyn, a distant relation of Elizabeth’s mother Anne. John Boleyn has been accused of the crime and is set to stand trial at Norwich Assizes. He appears to have means, motive and opportunity, especially since his alibi for the night of the murder is questionable. But as Shardlake and his young assistant Nicholas Overton discover, there are others who might want Boleyn’s wife dead or want Boleyn found guilty of her murder, executed and his land forfeited. There’s also the mystery of Edith’s unexplained disappearance nine years earlier. Just where did she go and why did she return after all that time?

At this point, the story goes off at a tangent, a rather lengthy tangent it has to be said. Shardlake, Nicholas and Shardlake’s former assistant Jack Barak find themselves caught up in an uprising taking place in protest against the enclosure of common land and other grievances against the landowners. In Norfolk it’s led by the charismatic Robert Kett and the rebels soon establish a large camp outside Norwich, at the time England’s second largest city. Barak throws in his lot with the rebels while Nicholas, opposed to them, becomes a prisoner in Norwich Castle and Shardlake finds himself legal advisor to Kett, trying to mitigate the penalties inflicted on the gentry tried at the rebel’s makeshift court. Inwardly he has sympathy with the rebels’ cause but dare not make it public and, as he constantly reminds himself, he must ensure John Boleyn receives justice.

The events of the so-called Kett’s Rebellion are described in detail and is obviously the result of much research. I confess my interest waned at this point and I was eager to get back to the murder mystery, which the book eventually does.

There are also secondary plots involving Shardlake’s former servant Josephine and her husband, Barak’s wife’s continuing animosity towards Shardlake, and the increasing frailty of Shardlake’s longtime friend Guy.

The Shardlake of Tombland is feeling his age. There are frequent references to his aching back and the exhaustion he feels after days of travel. There is an elegaic quality to the book, although apparently the author was working on the next book at the time of his death. Although not my favourite of the series, Tombland definitely demonstrates the author’s ability to combine historical fact and fiction.

In three words: Intriguing, atmospheric, immersive
Try something similar: Sacrilege by S. J. Parris

About the Author

C J Sansom was born in 1952 in Edinburgh. He achieved a BA and then a PhD in History from Birmingham University. After working in a variety of jobs, he retrained as a solicitor and practised in Sussex, until becoming a full-time writer. He combined both history and law in his debut novel Dissolution – which took readers into the dark heart of Tudor England in a gripping novel of monastic treachery and death. This success sparked the bestselling Shardlake series, set in the reigns of Henry VIII and young Edward VI, and following the sixteenth-century lawyer-detective Matthew Shardlake and his assistant Jack Barak. C J Sansom died on 27th April 2024 aged 71.

Book Review – All the Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy

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About the Book

Front cover of All the Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy

“In my childhood, I was known as the boy whose mother had run off with an Englishman.”

So begins the story of Myshkin and his mother Gayatri, who is driven to rebel against tradition and follow her artist’s instinct for freedom.

Freedom of a different kind is in the air across India. The fight against British rule is reaching a critical turn. The Nazis have come to power in Germany. At this point of crisis, two strangers arrive in Gayatri’s town, opening up to her the vision of other possible lives.

What took Myshkin’s mother from India to Dutch-held Bali in the 1930s, ripping a knife through his comfortingly familiar universe? Excavating the roots of the world in which he was abandoned, Myshkin comes to understand the connections between the anguish at home and a war-torn universe overtaken by patriotism.

This enthralling novel tells a tragic story of men and women trapped in a dangerous era uncannily similar to the present. Its scale is matched by its power as a parable for our times.

Format: Hardcover (360 pages) Publisher: MacLehose Press
Publication date: 1st June 2018 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction always turns up a wealth of interesting books, some of which I might never have come across otherwise. Longlisted in 2019, it’s taken me a long time to get around to reading All the Lives We Never Lived but it’s another one ticked off the list. (By my reckoning there are still over 20 books longlisted since 2019 that I haven’t read.)

The book’s title tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the story. Myshkin’s mother Gayatri feels trapped in her current role as wife and mother. Her interest in art, poetry and music, awakened during trips abroad as a young girl with her liberal-minded father, has now been stifled. Myshkin’s father views them as affectations, increasingly so as he becomes involved in the Indian independence movement and a spiritual quest.

It’s through Myshkin’s eyes that we see his mother’s frustration played out. To be more accurate it’s his childhood memories we’re reading, set down by him towards the end of his life. There were many things he witnessed as a child that he didn’t understand the full meaning of. All he knew was that his mother was unhappy and that one day she simply disappeared in search of the fulfilment she craved. His only contact from that day forward was the occasional letter from the island of Bali, the place that had made such an impression on her during her travels with her father. And then, when war comes to the Dutch East Indies, suddenly even that stops.

It’s only much later, through letters sent by his mother to her friend Lisa, that we learn about Gayatri’s life in Bali. They describe her initial delight at her new found freedom to pursue her passion for painting and her determination to make enough money to have Myshkin join her. Then her growing disillusionment and, finally, her fear of what will happen if the Japanese occupy Bali.

It has to be said that Gayatri is a rather voluble correspondent, constantly chiding her friend Lisa to write more often and to send her news of Myshkin. Ironic given she’s the one who abandoned him. I found the letters rather gushing and I wasn’t convinced an epistolary format was the best way to tell the story of Gayatri’s time in Bali.

As we learn from Myshkin the man his mother was said to have ‘run off with’ was not an Englishman but a German painter, Walter Spies. (I didn’t realise until I read the author’s note that he was a real life figure.) Despite the fact he seems to put a spell on so many of the characters, including Myshkin, I didn’t feel I actually got to know him that well.

Myshkin pursues a career as horticulturalist specialising in urban tree planting. My favourite quote from the book is his mentor’s response when Myshkin confides he’s thinking about finding a more lucrative occupation. It’s a version of a Chinese proverb: ‘If you wish to be happy for an hour, drink wine; if you wish to be happy for three days, get married. If you wish to be happy for eight days, kill your pig and eat it; but if you wish to be happy forever, become a gardener.’

All the Lives We Never Lived covers a lot of ground, possibly too much. In addition to Gayatri’s story we get, amongst other things, stuff about Indian politics in the 1930s, Indian culture and spirituality, women’s position in society, the impact on India of WW2 and attitudes to homosexuality. Surprising then that, although beautifully written, I found it rather slow.

About the Author

Author Anuradha Roy

Anuradha Roy is a writer and potter. She was born in Kolkata and grew up mostly in Hyderabad, India, though she lived in many places through her nomadic childhood. She studied Literature at Presidency College, Kolkata and at Cambridge University, UK.

Roy has written five novels. Her first, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, was translated into sixteen languages and was voted Book of the Year in a number of places, including Washington Post, Seattle Times, and Huffington Post. It was Editor’s Choice, New York Times. Sleeping on Jupiter, her third novel, won the DSC Prize for Fiction 2016 and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2015. All the Lives We Never Lived won the 2022 Sahitya Akademi Award, one of India’s highest literary honours, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award.

Roy lives in Ranikhet, where she is a graphic designer at Permanent Black, a scholarly press she runs with her partner, Rukun Advani, and four dogs. (Bio: Author website/Photo: Facebook profile)

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