Sceptre
The Teleportation Accident
The Accident begins in a Cabaret-like Weimar Berlin, but wanders from there to a McCarthy Hollywood. And even as far…
The Daughters of Mars
The First World War has become a staple of recent fiction. Thomas Keneally, in this epic novel told from an…
Lucky Bunny
The title of Jill Dawson’s seventh novel, Lucky Bunny, is ironic. The white bunny that Queenie Dove receives as a…
The House of Rumour
At first sight this is a conspiracy thriller, although more ‘literary’ than most, as one would expect from Sceptre. It…
Pure
Editors' choice
Pure is a novel about the clearance of the cemetery at Les Innocents in Paris in 1785 and the transportation…
Nightwoods
One of my favorite lines in Nightwoods is: “Luce was not much maternal.” She is young, single, and childless, but…
Rules of Civility
Editors' choice
As a debut novel, Rules of Civility is a tour de force. Breathtaking in its capture of 1938 New…
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Editors' choice
David Mitchell has written an historical novel which equals if not surpasses the originality of his previous prize-listed works including…
The People’s Train
This is a fictionalised biography of Artem Sergiev, prisoner in pre-revolutionary Russia who fled to Australia in 1911. In Thomas…
The Missing
Sam Simoneaux arrived in France for the Great War just in time to clean up after the Germans. Not a…
About our Reviews
Over the last 15 years The Historical Novels Review (the society’s print magazine for our members) has published reviews of some 12,000 historical fiction books. We plan to upload them all and make them searchable here.
