|summary=Nurse Montgomery (Monty to her friends) and daring ambulance driver, Ada, met in Belgium during World War I. They worked as a team collecting the injured from the front line, dodging snipers and shells and ignoring social standards that accompanied the class system of the day. Monty may have been Ada's social 'superior' but such things were irrelevant whilst they faced death on an hourly basis. After the war Monty comes to work at Bleakly Hall, a hydropathic or country house hotel specialising in hydro therapies for the rich and ailing and is reunited with Ada, working as a mechanic and all-round assistant.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099513471</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Helen Dunmore
|title=The Greatcoat
|rating=4
|genre=Horror
|summary=Set in 1952 in Yorkshire, a young couple move into a rented flat. Philip is the new, young doctor while his new wife Isabel struggles with the isolated life with no friends or family and Philip's frequent absence due to the demands of his job. Things take a turn to the spooky when, waking from under the warmth of the old greatcoat Isabel finds in the flat, she hears a tapping at the window and finds there an RAF pilot, Alec, who appears to know Isabel intimately.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099564939</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Marina Endicott
|title=The Little Shadows
|rating=4
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=Flora Avery's schoolmaster husband dies suddenly, leaving her three daughters and a dilemma: how does she find the money to raise them? Her answer is to return to her pre-marital profession, the one of which her husband disapproved so vocally. Flora decides to put her family on the stage as a vaudeville act. So begins a new life as they tour the backwater theatres of America and their native Canada, dreaming of a big future whilst weathering the present. Set prior to and during World War I, it wasn't just the Averys who faced changes and uncertainty.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0091944023</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Karen Harper
|title=Shakespeare's Mistress
|rating=2
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=
The conceit of ''Shakespeare's Mistress'' is that Shakespeare was married to Anne Whateley the day before he was married to Anne Hathaway, and Anne W remained the love of his life, with an affair (if you can have an affair with your 'wife') continued in London where the same Anne was also the famed ''dark lady'' of his sonnets. There is some basis for this theory in that the parish records do show a mysterious entry into the register for just such a contract the day before the Hathaway marriage but although the author claims this is 'faction', it's very much at the fiction end of that scale and is really a 'what if?' piece.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0091940427</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Robin Wasserman
|title=The Book of Blood and Shadow
|rating=4.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=Nora is an unusual heroine. She is sharp, snarky and funny, and her wry tone and contemporary references will resonate with her readers. But she is also uncompromisingly geeky, and she opts to complete her independent study assignment by joining her three friends at the local university in a research project on the Voynich Manuscript by Edward Kelley (This manuscript actually exists, and has taxed the abilities of some of the greatest code-breakers in the world in the last hundred years.). However Professor Hoffpauer does not consider Nora mature enough to work on the manuscript itself, despite the fact that her linguistic ability is far superior to that of the others, and instead he gives her the lesser task of translating the letters of Kelley's step-daughter Elizabeth Weston.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907411445</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt
|title=Noah's Child
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Joseph, a young Belgian Jew, is sent away by his parents when they grow nervous about the treatment of Jews during World War Two. He is taken in by a village priest, Father Pons, and given a new identity and a place in Father Pons' school along with an assortment of other children, some of whom are genuine pupils and others who are, like Joseph, seeking sanctuary.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848874189</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Robert Lyndon
|title=Hawk Quest
|rating=4.5
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=''Hawk Quest'' is an epic of a historic novel set in the 11th century. A band of companions led by Vallon, the mysterious Frankish warrior, travel from England to Scandinavia and on to Anatolia in order to capture and deliver four rare pure white falcons as a ransom for Sir Walter, the son of a Norman nobleman held by the Seljuk Turks.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847444970</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Chris Womersley
|title=Bereft
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Quinn Walker, a young Australian man fresh from fighting on the European front in World War One, returns to the very town he was drummed out of ten years before, after being accused of raping and killing his own younger sister. Two things have beaten him to the small settlement - one, the global flu pandemic; two a telegram saying he died bravely in action earlier in the war. And the less you know of what he meets and does back in Flint the better, the more to keep this fresh and brilliant book's many intrigues as secret as they were for me.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857386549</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kate Williams
|title=The Pleasures of Men
|rating=4
|genre=Crime (Historical)
|summary=Catherine Sorgeiul is a woman with burdens. Living with her uncle in London’s East End during the reign of Queen Victoria, hers is a life that seems empty – yet in fact is full of things she is trying to push away.
Filling her days has become a problem, so when a series of grisly murders begins, Catherine is drawn to the mystery of the Man of Crows in a way that seems bound to change her life.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241951399</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Katy Darby
|title=The Whores' Asylum
|rating=3.5
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=The Whores’ Asylum, a debut novel, is a tale of friendship, love, sin and criminality set in late 19th century Cambridge and Oxford. The comparison to one of my favourite historical novelists, Sarah Waters, also caught my attention. Sadly, I was a little bit disappointed.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905490801</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Eric Orsenna
|title=The Indies Enterprise
|rating=4.5
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=As soon as you pick up a novel about Columbus's discovery of the Americas, certain expectations come to mind. Orsenna however is much more than your average writer and he manages to subvert almost all of these by delivering a quiet, scholarly account of what seems at first a diversion, the art of map making. But this book is not about Columbus himself, but rather his brother Bartholomew, and how he is swept into the excitement and ambition of his older sibling.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906598932</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Louisa Young
|title=My Dear I Wanted to Tell You
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=It takes a while for the full power of Louisa Young's remarkable ''My Dear I Wanted To Tell You'' to become apparent, but when it does, it can hardly fail to move you. Set just before and during World War One, it's a story of love and human spirit against the odds. The impact of the book is in what happens to the characters, so I don't want to give too much away, but it's worth pointing out that it's not for the overly squeamish reader particularly in some of the descriptions of surgical procedures, which have clearly been meticulously researched by Young. The title itself it taken from the opening words of the standard letters that the wounded were given to send to loved ones back home. The wounded were required to fill in the blanks.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007361432</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Janette Jenkins
|title=Little Bones
|rating=4
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=While this might sound like the afterlife of a brilliant and unlikely cabaret mimic, it's not. It's a rich, evocative and engaging novel set in the last years of Victoria's reign, in the depths of her darkest London. Fate - and being abandoned by, in turn, her mother and older sister - leaves Jane Stretch living with and working for a doctor and his lumpen, housebound wife. Jane is alternatively called an 'unfortunate' and a 'cripple' for her disabilities and distorted frame, but she has enough bookish intelligence to pass herself off as an assistant to the doctor, who only ever does one operation - abortions, for music hall artistes. The plot is evidently gearing up to reveal how dangerous such a criminal business might be, for the both of them.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>070118194X</amazonuk>
}}
