The myth of Medusa from a female perspective. Excellent.
Author page: Stone Blind – Natalie Haynes
Stone Blind – Natalie Haynes
Genre: Historical fiction
Fatal Legacy – Lindsey Davis
Back to 1st Century AD Rome and some Flavia Albia sleuthing, this time into an unpaid bar bill which soon develops into a much more complicated case.
I found it hard keeping track of all the characters in the two warring families, partly because there are a lot of them but mainly because of how Roman personal names work; siblings and parents / children all share some of the same names.
Author page: Fatal Legacy – Lindsey Davis
Shrines of Gaiety – Kate Atkinson
London in the Roaring Twenties: women empowered by their experiences of the Great War, men scarred emotionally and physically.
Are the nightclubs ruled over by Nellie Coker Shrines of Gaiety or Dens of Iniquity? Both, really.
Another smashing novel from Kate Atkinson that blends the worlds of Jackson Brodie and the Todd family.
Author page: Shrines of Gaiety – Kate Atkinson
The Marriage Portrait – Maggie O’Farrell
Another wonderful historical novel by Maggie O’Farrell.
We are in 16th century Italy, still a patchwork of Dukedoms and city states, where Lucrezia de’ Medici, the third daughter of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Eleonora of Toledo, La Fecundissima, has been married to Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara.
As the bride in this dynastic marriage, Lucrezia replaces her elder sister, Maria, following Maria’s death. Lucrezia is 13 at the time of the wedding in 1558. Three years later she is dead.
It’s wonderful and fascinating how a novelist can take such a slight array of facts and create something so rich and absorbing, and yet still so intensely personal.
Whilst it is written in a very different style from Hamnet (no tears were shed in the reading of this novel), the elaborate prose suits (Maggie O’Farrell’s) Lucrezia’s inner voice – she observes the world with an artist’s eye and experiences life and emotion in extremes, as many teenagers do – and the richness of Italian Renaissance art.
I know nothing about Robert Browning’s famous poem My Last Duchess. The Marriage Portrait does not exist; but this portrait by Alessandro Allori does:
Other reviews:
- The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell review – a dark Renaissance fable by Lucy Hughes-Hallett (The Guardian, 26 Aug 2022)
- A Plucked Quince by Clare Bucknell (LRB Vol. 44 No. 19 · 6 October 2022)
Author page: The Marriage Portrait – Maggie O’Farrell
The Familiars – Stacey Halls
A female focused telling of the tale of the Pendle Witches, narrated by 17 year old Fleetwood Shuttleworth, mistress of Gawthorpe Hall. The one that got away.
Easy reading; real people; gruesome events. Not a criticism.
Author page: The Familiars – Stacey Halls