1) "Olivia and Jai" by Rebecca Ryman
Nineteenth-century British-colonial intrigue reigns supreme in this rococo first novel--a tale of a visiting American cousin who falls victim to the half-breed scourge of Calcutta's English society. The wealthy owners of a British tea-exporting company--Lady Bridget and Lord Josh Templewood--initially welcome their straight-shooting American niece as a healthy influence on their own spoiled teen-aged daughter, Estelle. Aunt Bridget delights in introducing pretty Olivia to Calcutta society, hoping to find the girl a husband and little suspecting that Olivia has already fallen in love with Jai Raventhorn--Uncle Josh's most imposing business competitor and the man Aunt Bridget hates most in India. A sworn enemy to English society, Jai begins his relationship with Olivia by insulting her, but soon grows to admire the passion and recklessness in her that appear so much like his own. But their secret love affair is soon disrupted as Jai persists in his apparently insane attempts to destroy Uncle Josh's tea business, deflowers Olivia and then, instructing Olivia to ""trust him,"" elopes with cousin Estelle. Furious and pregnant, Olivia marries a rich English beau in Jai's absence, but the marriage soon withers to name-only status, and an enraged Olivia is reduced to awaiting Jai's return in order to wreak her revenge. Much mutual sparring follows before Olivia learns that Estelle and Jai are not lovers but half-brother and sister, that Jai's feud with Uncle Josh is in fact a battle between a self-indulgent father and his illegitimate son, and that far from embodying an invincible force of evil as all Calcutta believes, Jai in fact longs to live peacefully with Olivia and their child. Eventually, the two quixotic spirits manage to become reconciled, determined to show one another how to love. Good old-fashioned, epic entertainment, told with admirable vigor and style.
2) "Restoration" by Rose Tremain
Robert Merivel, son of a glove maker and an aspiring physician, finds his fortunes transformed when he is given a position at the court of King Charles II. Merivel slips easily into a life of luxury and idleness, enthusiastically enjoying the women and wine of the vibrant Restoration age. But when he’s called on to serve the king in an unusual role, he transgresses the one law that he is forbidden to break and is brutally cast out from his newfound paradise. Thus begins Merivel’s journey to self-knowledge, which will take him down into the lowest depths of seventeenth-century society.
3) "The Traitor's Wife: A Novel of the Reign of Edward II" by Susan Higginbottom
A noblewoman pays the price for her loyalty to an unpopular king and her unfaithful husband.
Married off to Hugh le Despenser, a knight of lower stature, Eleanor de Clare nonetheless considers herself lucky: Not only is she the eldest daughter of an earl and pet niece of King Edward II, but she is genuinely in love with her husband. Her luck turns, however, when Hugh proves to be ruthlessly ambitious and begins an eight-year affair with Edward that yields him enormous power, as well as the resentment of various lords and barons who never respected the weak king. Hugh also makes an enemy of Edward’s wife, Queen Isabella, who raises an army to oust the king so that her son can assume take over the throne. When her campaign succeeds, Hugh is tried as a traitor while Eleanor and her children are imprisoned, indignities heaped upon them by the vengeful Isabella and her power-hungry lover, Roger Mortimer. Though Higginbotham effectively introduces sympathetic characters, she eventually reduces Isabella and Roger to overly spiteful caricatures. Worse, Eleanor’s reaction to her husband’s infidelity is remarkably subdued, given her complete devotion to Hugh–it’s particularly jarring in a story that otherwise conveys emotions and relationships quite poignantly.
At times melodramatic and uneven, but ultimately, entertaining historical fiction.
4) "In the Company of the Courtesan" by Sarah Dunant
Another tale of Renaissance Italy from Dunant (The Birth of Venus, 2003, etc.), this time replacing the art of painting with the art of seduction.
The story begins in 1527 with the sack of Rome by (irony of ironies) the army of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. While her neighbors barricade themselves inside their homes, Fiammetta Bianchini tells her cook to prepare a feast, gets dressed up and throws open her doors to the soldiers overturning her city, hoping that charm and hospitality will subdue invaders bent on rape and pillage. This bravura performance sets the stage for a drama that delights and dazzles from first page to last. Smart, witty and fearless, the delightful heroine is joined by an equally engaging cast of supporting characters. First among them is the dwarf Bucino, Fiammetta’s business partner and closest friend. He’s also the novel’s narrator and, when he and his mistress move their operations to Venice, the reader’s escort in the city. Bucino is an ideal guide, keen-eyed and sharp-witted, and the fact that he’s a newcomer to La Serenissima ably serves the larger purposes of this intelligently structured text. The reader learns Venice’s secrets as he does, and Dunant avoids the leaden exposition so common in historical fiction. She lets the life stories of Fiammetta and Bucino unfurl just as organically. Her captivating prose is restrained but eloquent, with flashes of pure poetry. Dunant uses language that feels antique without seeming ridiculous, and she treats the past as a real place rather than an amusement park. She never lets the reader forget that her Venice is a 16th-century city, offering just the right mix of raw sewage and gold-domed cathedrals, but she also makes it convincingly modern: truly cosmopolitan, ruled by commerce and gossip. It’s the perfect setting for an enterprising whore, a resourceful dwarf and a story of love and intrigue.
5) "The King's Grey Mare" by Rosemary Hawley Jarman
Miss Jarman, a new and commanding talent among those who brave the tangle of medieval England's royalty, reconstituted the maligned Richard III in We Speak Not Treason (1971); here she takes on the much more complex and shadowy career of Elizabeth Woodville, Queen of Edward IV -- usually limned as witch or martyr. She was, after all, daughter of Jacquetta Woodville reputed to have dabbled in pagan rites and she was also the mother of the two doomed princes murdered in the Tower. But in following Elizabeth through four reigns (Henry VI, Edward IV, Richard III and Henry VII), all violent and shaky except the last, that of the tenacious Tudor, the author convincingly carries the beautiful, impressionable but willful young lady-in-waiting through to the frenzied end game she loses to Henry VII as an embittered, exiled mother-in-law. A hint of evil magic, a blood feud with Warwick the Kingmaker, the loss of one loved husband, one royal spouse wed for power, and sons, relatives and position -- all contributed to a passionate and cruel life in which Elizabeth was as often persecutor as victim. A gentle subplot -- the love of the illegitimate children of Edward and Richard respectively -- is an antiphonal commentary to Elizabeth's story. And there's something new for amateur Richard-watchers -- Henry Tudor did in the Princes (Richard had spirited them to safety). Thus in scholarship Miss Jarman's as giddy as a wench behind the arras, but the tale's the thing -- big, blowsy and headlong, with aromatic period atmosphere and dialogue with that reminiscent ring: ""We are,"" proclaims Queen Margaret, ""fast on England.
6) "The Glass Blowers" by Daphne du Maurier
7) "The Birth of Venus" by Sarah Dunant
British author Dunant (Mapping the Edge, 2001, etc.) weaves everyone’s favorite art history moments into a vivid tapestry of life on the Arno during the upheaval of the Renaissance.
The postmortem ablutions of Sister Lucrezia reveal surprises. The breast cancer that was thought to have killed her was neither cancerous nor mammary, and her aged monastic corpse was lavishly decorated with a most vivid and decidedly impious serpent. How such things came to be are revealed in a retracing of the late nun’s youth, flowering, and de-flowering following the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Fourth and favorite child of a prosperous silk manufacturer and his highly cultured wife, Alessandra Cecchi is far less conventionally attractive than her sister, but she’s got her mother’s brains and a powerful craving to make art. So, cursed with excessive wit and artistry, this young Florentine is highly vulnerable to the surly attractions of the painter her upwardly mobile father has brought home from the gray reaches of northern Europe to do up the family chapel. The nameless decorator, however, seems impervious to her gawky charms, and the possibility of a relationship is nipped in the bud by the sudden need of a much older family acquaintance to find a wife and get an heir. Alas, on her wedding night Alessandra learns in the most humiliating way how it came to be that her flamboyant brother Tomaso was such good friends with her new husband Cristoforo and how there will be none of the carnal pleasures of the garden-variety marriage. The charming and cultured Cristoforo has formed this unholy alliance to stay out of the clutches of Girolamo Savonarola’s religious storm troopers. To the chagrin of all, the grisly wedding coupling fails to produce a child. Then, as the Dominican Taliban starts to squeeze the life from the Florentine Republic, Alessandra finds her way back to the family chapel and the very needy young genius.
No real surprises in the romance department, but the depiction of Florence as Tehran under the Ayatollah is an eye-opener.
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