2009: Historical Fiction

[bibliogramma]

Here Be Dragons, Sharon Kay Penman

Sharon Kay Penman is one of my favourite writers of historical fiction, and not just because she writes well, remains reasonably faithful to what is known about her subjects, and breathes into her characters a sense of life and truth. in addition to all of that, she seems to have a gift for picking out the people and periods of history that I find fascinating. Here Be Dragons is the story of the relationship between Llewelyn ab Iorwerth, Llewelyn the Great, Prince of Gwynedd and unifier of much of Wales, and Joanna (or Joan), the natural daughter of King John of England. I have read this book, and the others in Penman's Princes of Wales trilogy before, and was delighted to find that it was just as enjoyable on re-reading.



Nefertiti, Michelle Moran

I have always been fascinated by the Amarna period in Egyptian history. There is so much that is known, and yet so much that remains tantalizingly unknown about the family of Akhenaton, and this leave open a great deal of space for a writer to present her own theories about the family relationships, about who married who and who died and was buried when. Moran has some interesting ideas about the court of Amarna in this, her debut novel, but I found that she stretched the boundaries perhaps a bit too much, leaving me sceptical of her choices in some places. However, I enjoyed the looking at one vision of the story of Nefertiti, told from the perspective of Mutnodjmet, historically the wife of Pharoah Horemheb, and in this book presented as being the same person as Nefertiti's sister Mutbenret. I look forward to following Moran's growth as a writer.




Lady MacBeth, Susan Fraser King

A well-written and well-researched debut novel about a character who is barely known to history, but famous in literature as the ambitious wife of the Scottish lord who claimed the throne of Scotland - in Shakespeare's version, through treason and murder, but then, Shakespeare was writing for an audience that included the royal descendant of people who opposed MacBeth. Not as daring an interpretation of history as Dunnett's King Hereafter, this is all the same a realistic visualisation of what it could have been like, and Gruach - Lady MacBeth - is presented as a strong, if not always admirable, woman who survived and wielded power in dangerous and troubled times. Looking forward to King's next novel.