May We Feed The King

 

The Book: The unnamed main character is a Curator whose job it is to select and place objects in display rooms in museums and old buildings to bring the past to life for the public. The novel is divided into three parts. In the first part we learn about the Curator’s job and about the commission the Curator has received to update rooms in an old palace. The Curator forms a relationship with the archivist whose papers the Curator needs to study to learn about the people who lived in this palace. In the second part, the story shifts back in time to tell the story of the King whose story and time period the Curator has chosen to portray. It is an ambiguous story of a man who never wanted to be King. In the third part the story shifts back to the present in which the Curator is required to give a talk to the public before the display rooms open.

The Author: Rebecca Perry

Genre: Literary Fiction

Length: 331 pp. (e-reader, ipad mini)

One good thing:  I found the first part of this novel fascinating. This is a job I never thought about and it was interesting to read about how the Curator entered this profession and about daily life in that job. How a curator makes decisions about, and finds, the objects needed to bring a scene to life is something I may think about whenever I am in a museum.

One not-so-great thing: If you aren’t into reading about the minutiae of historical tableau you might find yourself skimming. I don’t mind it too much but did find myself skimming especially at the end.

Four Doorways: Story; Characters; Setting; Language****

Rebecca Perry is a poet so it is probably no surprise that I find the strongest part of this novel to be her use of language. It is a beautiful book to read on the sentence level and since it is very short it is a delightful way to spend an afternoon. On that basis I can recommend this novel.

But after I was finished it all melted away except a bit of the first section. I didn’t find myself thinking about it. In some ways, this novel is more of a meditation than a story but I did not find myself meditating on the themes. Poets are not necessarily known for specificity but Perry can be very specific, creating lists of objects. I never really, however, had a true sense of place. It was like she created a painting with hints of color here and there and even though it showed with great specificity the items in a room, the room did not come alive for me.

Ironically, the Curator believes that putting specific details into the rooms she populates can give you a sense of the person who lived in that room but all of the details in the novel didn’t flesh out the characters for me. And even when Perry is writing in the head of a character, or reporting what a character said, there is a certain vagueness. This is intentional. Part of the point she is making in this book is that no one can really know another person, no one can really know what is happening in the same building and no one can really know what the past was really like. Sometimes details are preserved for us but we can never have a full picture. The problem for me was that I didn’t really care about the characters. There is a bit of a mystery about the King but I found it easy to simply accept that the mystery would not be solved for me because I understand that we never completely know history.

These are not new ideas for a novelist to explore and I wasn’t particularly interested in them. The most interesting thought for me in the novel is her description of how the Curator and the archivist each had a moment in their lives where “the world rotated a degree” when they encountered something that allowed each to enter into another world. She describes it as creating a thread tethering the Curator to what lay beyond. This is the moment when each chose their profession. I would have liked more of that. I was interested in learning more about the Curator and the archivist and not particularly interested in the King.

Some people are calling this novel historical fiction but from what I can tell all the history in the novel is fiction. It isn’t clear what country the story is set in or even what specific years (although the King's story is certainly medieval). Also, while I didn’t go back to check every line, I don’t think the gender of the Curator (or the archivist) are ever specified. I found myself thinking of the Curator as a "she" because the author is a woman but I think the Curator could just as easily have been a man.

This is a first novel for Perry. I’ll be interested to see where she goes from here. As I said, on a sentence level this is a beautiful novel. It isn't long and is certainly worth spending time on.  This novel is on the Booker Prize shortlist. 

****"It seems to me that all works of fiction and narrative nonfiction are broadly made up of four experiential elements: story, character, setting, and language. I call these “doorways,” because when we open a book, read the first few pages, and choose to go on, we enter the world of that book. And I’ve come to believe we can help readers better choose their next book by looking at the proportion of these four elements."  Nancy Pearl on the Four Doorways.

    

  

Our Noble Selves

The Book: Harry Flynn came back from World War II a broken man. As a young journalist he was captured in Singapore by the Japanese and, as a prisoner of war, he was put to work building the infamous Burma-Thailand railroad, a project that killed thousands of prisoners of war (for background you might watch The Bridge Over the River Kwai). Harry makes it back alive although he was listed as Missing, Presumed Dead.  Life seems hopeless. “It wasn’t that he wanted to be dead, he simply couldn’t be bothered with the tiresome business of being alive. It seemed ironic, having spent the last three years struggling to do just that.”  But then he realized he’d “been given back his life and he was going to have to live it, whether he liked it or not.” As the novel starts it is 1949 and Harry has left an ill advised suburban marriage (complete with a step-daughter named Veronica and a little dog named Mrs. Betty) and is working at a dead end job. Then one day he is approached by his old boss and asked to work on The Festival of Britain, a national festival with exhibitions to be held in 1951 and to be built from scratch on the south bank of the Thames. He agrees although he doesn't really have a job description. He's there to "take up some slack" and to compile a poetry anthology. Turn the page and it is now 1951 and the festival is on the verge of opening. It turns out that Harry works in a small office in Savoy Court and every part of the festival having to do with the display rooms, including the sourcing of materials, comes through his office. Harry works with two other men, both are veterans and none of them like to talk about what they did in the War. There is also an errand boy (known as The Boy) who they all take under their wing. The job has been good for Harry, he is starting to feel more alive. All is going well until the night he is asked to meet a young French woman for a drink. The next morning Harry can't remember what happened after the woman left him at the pub but the woman is missing and many people seem to suspect that Harry killed her.  And on top of all that, Veronica and Mrs. Betty show up on his doorstep.

The Author: Kate Atkinson

Genre: Historical Mystery 

Length: 504 pp. (e-reader, ipad mini)

One good thing:  I knew nothing about The Festival of Britain before reading this book. As usual Kate Atkinson has done stellar research and incorporated it into the plot, most often in incredibly humorous ways. I was fascinated.

One not-so-great thing: It takes a while for the “mystery” plot to get going and it all gets “solved” or tied up a little too easily for my taste.  But that often happens in these type of “ordinary man caught up in strange circumstances” stories.

Four Doorways: Story; Characters; Setting; Language**** 

Although my summary makes this sound like a ordinary thriller, Kate Atkinson doesn't write ordinary thrillers. In fact the mystery plot seems secondary to the rest of the novel and truthfully gets wrapped up too easily. If you are looking for a plot driven book that takes off from the beginning, this might not be for you. But if you are ready for a slow build, it does eventually get going. There are points when a reader must wonder how she is going to draw the threads of the story together into a reasonable ending. How does the contest for a Festival Cake fit into the plot? What about the young women who are supposed to roam around the festival grounds selling Oranges?  

But in the end the plot isn't really the point; it is the characters and the setting that draw the reader in. Atkinson’s strong point is always her characters. As usual, Atkinson introduces a plethora of quirky characters in quirky situations, each character completely fleshed out so that all of their strange tics and flaws (and they have many) seem perfectly natural. Be warned, Harry’s back story is very sad and even though Atkinson doesn’t dwell on the details of Harry’s time in the prisoner of war camp, it permeates the novel. Since it takes a good long while for the plot to get going, readers may feel the novel is too dark despite the humor strewn throughout. (It does get lighter once the mystery plot builds up.) 

For those who love a good setting, her descriptions of the festival grounds made me wish I could have seen it. (To help things along she includes insets from plans of the festival grounds before each chapter. I kept thinking that Walt Disney had similar ideas when he created Epcot). It is clear that Atkinson did a ton of research into the festival but I did not feel she let the research overwhelm her plot. On the other hand if you have little patience for minutiae, you may grow tired of the descriptions. 

Atkinson is one of my favorite writers. Although this novel doesn't begin to approach the brilliance of Life After Life, it is enjoyable and she does create a believable character in Harry Flynn, a man who went through hell in the War and sometimes is just hanging on by a thread. By the way, the title is taken from a toast made by the Army on Wednesdays:  To our Noble Selves.

****"It seems to me that all works of fiction and narrative nonfiction are broadly made up of four experiential elements: story, character, setting, and language. I call these “doorways,” because when we open a book, read the first few pages, and choose to go on, we enter the world of that book. And I’ve come to believe we can help readers better choose their next book by looking at the proportion of these four elements."  Nancy Pearl on the Four Doorways.

Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead

It is the 1980's and New York City is coming out if its 1970’s bankruptcy crisis. Ed Koch is mayor and things are looking up for some people. There is a building boom, with skyscrapers rising every day, but the city's poorest denizens live on the street often literally underground. The city is graffiti covered and "Escape From New York" is playing in the theaters. As the novel opens, Ray Carney, who has been selling Sterling Furniture from his store in Harlem for over 20 years has been chosen by Sterling as "Regional Dealer of the Month - Northeast."  Today Ray is being interviewed over the phone for the Company’s magazine. Ray is pretty sure he is the first Black Dealer to ever be chosen for this honor. 

Of course, over the years Ray has also had a from-time-to-time side business of fencing stolen property, but Sterling doesn’t need to know that. Then Ray receives a message from his friend Martin Green that says “The new samples have arrived”. This is a code that there is a fence “opportunity” right up Ray’s alley. Ray intends to turn it down (he has mostly gone straight these days) and only have a nice dinner with Green. But when Ray arrives at his friend’s office he discovers Green bound and gagged and two white men with pistols waiting for him. They are looking for Uncle Rich, a legendary uptown criminal mastermind who Ray only knew as Dwayne. Ray, who had just been thinking that he had attained all he could ever want (a wife he loved, two successful children, a beautiful home and the highest accolades in his business) finds himself drawn into the crime world. Again. 

This is the third book in the Ray Carney trilogy that Whitehead has been writing over the years. The first book was set in the 1960's, the second book was in the 1970's and now Ray is living through the 1980's in New York City, a city he both loves and doesn't trust. A city that will use you up and spit you out. A city of opportunity (if it doesn't destroy you). 

New York City, specifically but not exclusively Harlem, is as much a character in these novels as Ray Carney. You not only see the city, you smell it and feel it as Ray walks its dirty streets. And yet, you see why Ray loves it. 

The plot is divided into three parts, each set in different years. This novel is really three inter-connected novellas, a structure that I'm not fond of but that worked perfectly well for me here. In the first section, set in 1981, Ray is drawn, once again, back into crime. In the second part, set in 1983, Ray's friend and mentor Pepper is also drawn back into crime when Ray's wife Elizabeth asks him to act as bodyguard to one of her travel agency clients. Although their adventures cause each of them to decide to pull back from crime, they are both drawn back in when, in the third part, set in 1986, Ray's nephew needs them. 

Generally this type of structure lacks propulsion for me but Whitehead is able to keep it going. He writes in a very cinematic style, drawing in the reader at the beginning of each section. Then he uses carefully placed flashbacks and memories to fill in the gaps as the story goes along. He is so good at voices that he can give you a narrative info dump without you really realizing it. He can show you the actions that took place in the past at the same time as he is portraying the actions taking place in the present. I wish I could force every writer who thinks that writing about two periods means you have to put each period in a different chapter to study how Whitehead does it. 

But it is his character creation that clinches it for me. He always starts by giving his main characters a good reason for being drawn into the crime world and it always involves family (by blood or choice). In the first part Ray tells himself that he wants extra cash to help his wife Elizabeth who is starting her own travel agency and wants to expand. But no bank will lend to her. In the second part, Pepper simply can't say no to Elizabeth's request because he loves the Carneys like family. In the third part, there is an actual family member involved. 

But even as Ray and Pepper have these reasons for going along with a plan, in reality they are both crooks at heart. As Ray thinks: “He’d always blamed other people for dragging him into their messes, but all bullshit aside he chose the chaos himself. Deep down he loved the chaos as much as the next crooked soul.”  

As with all of the best novels, Whitehead doesn't just tell a story, he asks questions. In this novel there is the question of nature vs. nurture. There is also the question each character must ask (that another character directly asks), what is it that is truly of value to YOU? There are also questions about colonialism and art theft by colonialists and others. And there is the question of when it is time to hang it all up and retire, and what retirement means. 

And then there are the parts of the novel that simply appealed to me, that made me smile or laugh out loud. For instance, Ray has no patience with anyone who voted for Ronald Reagan. Toward the beginning he is impatient with former hippies that sold out and voted for Reagan. By the end, Ray fires one of his sales associates who admitted that he voted for Reagan not once but twice. 

I think I read that Whitehead only intended a trilogy for Ray Carney and in a way I'm sad because I would like to see Ray in the 1990's.  I also read somewhere that there is to be a series based on the novels and I'm intrigued. In the meantime, if this is the final novel it was a fine one. 

    

  

Goldsmiths Prize Shortlist 2026

 The shortlist for the 2026 Goldsmiths Prize was announced. 

Now in its fourteenth year, the Goldsmiths Prize was launched in association with The New Statesman in 2013 with the goal of celebrating the creative daring associated with Goldsmiths and to reward fiction from the UK and Ireland that is genuinely novel and embodies the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best.    

The judging panel includes Francis Spufford, a favorite author of mine. 

Here is the list:

• Polly Barton, What Am I, A Deer? (Fitzcarraldo Editions) 
• China Miéville, The Rouse (Picador) 
• Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Said the Dead (Faber) 
• Keith Ridgway, Dooneen (Fitzcarraldo Editions) 
• Aea Varfis-van Warmelo, Attention Seeking Behaviour (Peninsula Press) 
• Missouri Williams, The Vivisectors (4th Estate) 

I put these lists on my blog mostly so I can remind myself of books I might be interested in but don’t necessarily immediately put on a TBR list.

September 2026 Reading

During August I read more historical fiction novels than usual and, while they were enjoyable, they were long and/or dense and took some effort to read. By September I was ready to kick back and make my reading easier. When that happens I fall back on mysteries and that's mainly what I read this month. In truth, I've been in a bit of a reading slump, unable to concentrate on anything that requires effort. So these mysteries were a sort of life saver for me. 

These are the books I finished in September. 

MYSTERIES

The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentil

The Boston Public Library is usually a quiet place but one day a woman’s scream pierces the air. Four strangers at a table begin to talk to each other about the scream and become unlikely friends. The source of the scream is not located at that time but the next day a woman’s body is found. But, is one of the friends involved in the murder? I am a fan of Gentil's Rowland Sinclair mystery series and am just starting to read her standalone novels. I enjoyed this one although there is a mystery within the mystery that I found a bit distracting (and found I found it completely unbelievable that someone could travel from North America to Australia in the midst of the pandemic when Australia was on a very deep lockdown.) However, Sinclair, who is Australian, has a nice easy to read writing style that brings the reader along and her main character was quite likable. 

Death in Paris by Emilia Bernhard

Rachel, an American living in Paris, is surprised to hear that a former lover has died by drowning in a bowl of soup.  But when she hears that a bottle of rose wine was also on the table, she is even more surprised, because he HATED rose wine. Although the police rule the death accidental due to a heart attack, Rachel  decides that he must have been murdered and she (and her best friend Magda) start to investigate. I think this was a debut novel and for a debut mystery it wasn't bad. Bernhard is no Agatha Christie but Rachel was a likeable main character, if a little dense. As regular readers know, I hate novels written in the first person where the main character has to be a little stupid to make the plot work. I don't like to be in the heads of stupid people. Fortunately, this was written in the third person so it didn't bother me too much. I could nit pick about parts of the plots and character development but I won't. This is a good "palette cleanser" mystery that won't fill you up but will refresh you before your next deep read. I didn't bother to check but it looked like she was setting it up at the end to be a series.

From the Charred Remains by Susanna Calkins

The year is 1666, only a few weeks after the Great Fire of London and the people of London are (literally) digging out from the fire. Lucy Campion, a lady's maid to a lady who is now deceased, is trying to decide what to do next and, in the meantime, is assisting with the digging. She is there when a couple of boys discover a murdered man in a keg. On his person is a leather bag with an odd assortment of objects including a poem that doesn't make much sense. Who was he? Can Lucy figure it out so that justice can be done? I liked this novel even though I figured out quite early that is is the second in a series, but that didn't matter. Calkins managed to weave in any facts from the first book that were necessary for this book without undue exposition and without giving away too much of the plot of the first book. Lucy is an interesting main character. She is literate and wants to eventually own her own print shop where she can print, among other things, her own writing.  When she becomes an (unofficial) apprentice at a print shop the details of her day to day life were very interesting. The mystery itself was good.  I think I will go back and read the first in the series.

The Chrysanthemum Tiger by Alys Clare

When I picked up this novel at the library I knew it was part of an ongoing Gabriel Taverner Mystery series which I had never read, but I thought that wouldn't matter. I'm used to writers of historical mysteries doing what Susanna Calkins (above) did - writing a standalone mystery in each volume but perhaps expanding on the character development. I was wrong in this case and I don't recommend reading this novel if you've not read the other novels in the series. First, there really wasn't much of a mystery. Although a murder takes place it doesn't happen until well into the book and isn't the crux of the story. Second, the action is split between the adventures of Taverner in the far east and on his trip back home and the people he left behind. Since I knew nothing about those people having never read the other novels, I didn't care about them. Third, there is an element of the supernatural in this novel that just didn't ring true to me. Finally, while the idea of an Englishman in Japan in the early 1600's seems a great idea to me for an historical novel, Clare didn't really give me enough detail since she was simply using it as a setup for the rest of the story.  This did not make me want to read any of the other Taverner novels and I can't recommend it. 

Murder in Mayfair by D.M.Quincy
Murder in Bloomsbury D.M. Quincy
Murder at the Opera by D.M. Quincy

We are in London during the Regency and Atlas Catesby is an amateur investigator. The fourth son of a now deceased famous poet and minor aristocrat, Catesby has been haunted by the death of his older sister Phoebe. He can't settle down and is constantly traveling. However, a carriage accident has resulted in a broken foot that required him to stay in England for some time. While returning to London from a trip to Bath with his friend the Earl of Charlton, they come across a man attempting to sell his wife to the highest bidder. Appalled, Catesby "purchases" her. But she turns out to be a somewhat mysterious woman. When the husband is later found dead, Catesby must solve the crime. It is rare that the library has all three books of a series available at one time so I jumped on the chance to check them out figuring that if I didn't like the first one I'd just return all of them. But I did enjoy the first, so I read all three. As far as I can tell, there have been no further volumes written. These are light entertainment but the characters are well drawn. I have to say that I sometimes get tired of Regency mysteries that are full of Dukes and Earls, etc. and I felt that you could tell this author also wrote historical romances perhaps set during that period and they were her first love, not mysteries. But the mysteries are perfectly fine. Although set during the Regency I didn't think Quincy dwelled too much on the time period details and in many ways the time period didn't much matter. These were good books to pass hot summer days with and would make good vacation reading for people who like mysteries.  D.M. Quincy is the pen name of Diana Awad, a former journalist who also writes historical romance as Diana Quincy. 

Earthly Delights by Kerry Greenwood

I was a fan of the Phryne Fisher mystery series written by Kerry Greenwood and set in Australia. I heard that she passed away last year and the last book was published posthumously.  I haven't read it yet. But I did discover at the library that she wrote another series set in Melbourne so I checked out the first book of that series. Earthly Delights is the first of the Corinna Chapman series. This series is not historical (although it’s been so long since publication it seems historical). Corinna, a former accountant in Melbourne, walks away from her job and her husband and opens a bakery called Earthly Delights. One day she opens the back door of the bakery to find a young woman dying of an overdose. Corinna calls emergency and the young woman is saved. At the same time Corinna meets the handsome and mysterious man who spends his time helping feed people who are living on the street. He is concerned that someone is intentionally killing junkies and he recruits Corinna to help him figure out who. As if that is not enough, Corinna is also trying to figure out who is sending threatening letters to the women in her building.  As the first book in a series there is a lot of setup and character introduction but fortunately the characters are interesting and include Goths, Wiccans, a sympathetic female cop and even a Dominatrix. The actual mystery was good too. I will probably read more. 

Death at the White Hart by Chris Chibnall

Chris Chibnall is best known as the writer and creator of the British TV Series Broadchurch, which I enjoyed immensely. He also was the writer and show runner of Doctor Who for a few seasons and I did not enjoy those very much. He has now published a mystery novel and ... it's very good! The proprietor of a local pub is found one night dead, sitting on a chair in the middle of the road with deer antlers affixed to his head. The investigating office is new to town having moved from Liverpool, where she had a good reputation in putting organized crime villains behind bars. She thought she was moving to a place where life would be quieter. Her constable is completely green but together they must solve this crime. Not surprisingly Chibnall is great at setting a scene and with dialog. The plot hangs together. I wasn't totally surprised at the end (there are only so many persons that could have done it) but that didn't matter. It's possible he is setting this up to be a series and I would read more. 

GENERAL FICTION

A Song Over Miskwaa Rapids by Linda LeGarde Grover

Margie Robineau is fighting the tribal council because they want to take part of her land allotment to complete a road from the reservation to the nearby State Park. She is prepared to make a presentation at the next meeting. But in the meantime she meets her friend Theresa, who is undergoing chemotherapy, for coffee at the State Park visitor center and, while they are there, an incident occurs revealing a death from long ago. The incident is precipitated by a group of mischievous ancestor ghosts who comment on the story throughout. This very short novel (less than 200 pages) is apparently one of a series of novels set on a fictional Ojibwe reservation in Northern Minnesota. The author is a member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe which is located up near where I vacation. I can’t remember where I heard of this novel and had forgotten that I had put in a library request months ago. I think I might look for her the other books because I did enjoy this one. 

NONFICTION

Forever Young: A Memoir by Hayley Mills

As a big consumer of Disney movies when I was young, I vividly remember Hayley Mills even though most of her child actress career was over before I was 10 years old.  In this memoir she recollects how she almost accidentally fell into movie acting. Her father was the well known British actor John Mills and her mother was a writer of plays and novels. Her older sister Juliet always knew that she wanted to be an actress but Hayley says she never really gave it any thought. Then one day a film director was visiting her father telling him that there was difficulty in casting a young boy as the lead in a film he was making. He saw Hayley goofing around with her brother, reciting television commercials and immediately decided to change the character to a girl and cast Hayley. Then Walt Disney saw that British film and signed her to a contract. Her first film was Pollyanna. In this memoir Hayley goes into a lot of detail of those Disney years and some of the years following (the memoir ends when she is about 30).  She's very nice about all the stars she worked with. She's very nice about her first husband who was more than 30 years older than she was. She only gets testy when talking about the family solicitor who set up the trust into which all of her childhood earnings were placed until she reached 21, which was then found defective in some way and the British Inland Revenue took over 90% of her money. But even then, she was too nice to sue him. I enjoyed this memoir; I listened on audio and it was read by the author herself so it sounded like she was telling me the story directly. My favorite Hayley Mills movie was not a Disney movie.  It was The Chalk Garden which also starred Deborah Kerr and Hayley's dad John Mills. Ironically, she didn't tell much about this film other than to say it was the first time in her life she got bad reviews. But looking back at them she now realized they weren't all bad; the bad ones were just the ones that stuck in her mind. Personally, I thought she did a great job. While I would have liked her to have told more about her adult life and maybe to have been not quite so nice, I did enjoy this book. Her ability to describe scenes was surprisingly vivid. 

Booker Prize Shortlist 2026

 Another list has been announced. This time it is the Booker Prize shortlist. 

I’ve read two of the novels: The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout and John of John by Douglas Stuart. I liked each of them very much, although two novels couldn’t be less alike.

Here’s a link to the judges discussing each book in case you are trying to decide if you should read one. In some ways though, they aren’t helpful because the judges, generally, seem to not know the meaning of the word “summarize” much less understand “summarize this book in a sentence to encourage people to pick it up.” 

I’m not sure that I will read any of the others except, maybe, May We Feed The King. Here's the list. These links take you to actual summaries.

Shortlist

• The End of Everything
• The Disappearers
• Black Bag
• May We Feed the King
• The Things We Never Say
• John of John

Crown Awards 2026 Longlist - Historical Fiction

The Historical Writers' Association has announced its 2026 Longlist for the Crown Awards. The 2026 Crown Awards (Debut, Non-Fiction, and Gold) are for full length books published for the first time in English in the UK between 1 April 2025 - 31 March 2026. The Gold Crown is for authors who have previously published full length novels. Below is the longlist for the Gold Crown.

I’ve read three of the longlisted books: The Bookbinder’s Secret, The Art of a Lie, and Nonesuch.  Click through to read my thoughts, but I can tell you that I liked each of them. I probably liked Nonesuch the best even though it has fantasy elements in it. It is a brilliant depiction of living through The Blitz. And I say that as someone who is not always a fan of WWII fiction. The Art of a Lie has a convoluted plot which may attract some people and repel others. I was fine with it. I only recently read The Bookbinder's Secret (last month, in fact) and I thought it was a debut novel but I must be wrong. I liked it but did criticize some stylistic choices. 

It is always a good sign for a longlist when I've liked the books on it that I have already read, so I intend to look up some of the others. I already have The Pretender. It's been waiting for me to find a big chunk of time (it's a big one!). 

Here is the list (the descriptions are from the HWA website). 

LONGLIST

The Bookbinder’s Secret by AD Bell (HQ)

An apprentice bookbinder at the turn of the 20th century is drawn into a dangerous intrigue. At once an enthralling mystery and a love letter to the lost art of bookbinding.

The Tarot Reader of Versailles by Anya Bergman (Manilla Press)

A rich blend of meticulous historical research into the extraordinary life of Marie-Anne Lenormand; magic, political intrigue at the heart of the French Revolution. It offers a vivid description of a world on the brink of violent transformation and its possible wider repercussions. 

The Venetian Heretic by Christian Cameron (Orion)

A vivid historical escape to Venice through the story of an Englishman who left his life of slavery behind him. This masterful storytelling dives into the streets of Venice bringing intrigue, sword fighting, revelries, and conspiracy.

The Last Witch by CJ Cooke (HarperCollins)

The true story of Helena Scheuberin’s defiance against one of Europe’s most notorious witchfinders is a gripping fusion of well-researched history, gothic horror, and psychological suspense. Its haunting atmosphere and fierce female solidarity make it a powerful and unforgettable historical novel.

A Scrooge Mystery by Andreina Cordani (Zaffre)

A very original idea and a fabulously fun read. This is a totally absorbing sequel to A Christmas Carol which transports you back to Dickens’s London. 

The Pretender by Jo Harkin (Bloomsbury)

A fictionalised telling of the early life of Lambert Simnel – pretender to the throne of Henry VII – which combines enviable stylistic verve with a wonderfully warm heart.

Lion Hearts by Dan Jones (Head of Zeus — an Aries Book)

The wars in France have created an unbreakable brotherhood that only fighting for your very survival can do. The Essex Dogs once fought and killed for each other. And must do again, reunited in Lion Hearts. Dan Jones gives us an epic conclusion to a truly memorable trilogy.

The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon (Swift Press)

A masterfully-told story which immerses you in a small close-knit rural community in 18th-century Massachusetts, told by an unusual but totally relatable main protagonist: wife, mother, and compassionate midwife. We could not put this book down.

The Winter Warriors by Olivier Norek translated by Nick Caistor (Open Borders Press)

Cold, brutal, gripping. Grounded in reality and drawing from actual eyewitness accounts, The Winter Warriors is an inspiring retelling of an almost-forgotten war.

The Art of a Lie by Laura Shepherd-Robinson (Mantle)

Sprightly crime caper set in a confectionery shop in vivacious Georgian London. Threaded with twists and turns and memorable characters, sparkling with wit and pathos.

Nonesuch by Francis Spufford (Faber & Faber)

A rich, immersive and assured blending of history and fantasy set in a claustrophobic World War Two London. Full of stylish prose; genre-bending too.

A Far-flung Life by ML Stedman (Doubleday)

Poignant and tragic family saga from the late 1950s set on a vast Western Australia sheep station; very memorably portrayed. Bleak, beautiful and epic, yet full of character nuance. 

The HWA Gold Crown Award judges are: Amy McElroy (chair), Ellen Alpsten, Rebecca Batley, Sharon Bennett Connolly, Jean Fullert