George starts with Helen as a small girl and takes her all the way through the Trojan War, back to Sparta and beyond. The most compelling things about Helen of Troy, besides the abundance of detail of daily life and war in ancient times, are George’s character portrayals.
Imagine watching your loving, nearly perfect mother stand on the front stairs of your farmhouse, put the baby down behind her and stab a man to death and then act as if this brutal act had little to do with her? Fifty years later Laurel Nicolson sets out to find the real answer in a novel spanning London in the blitz and an idyllic childhood in the English countryside post WWII.
An historical romance set in early Rome and the Etruscans, this novel contrasts the frugal Romans with the sensual Etruscans while unfolding the complexities and crises of a marriage between a Roman girl and a nobleman of Veii.
Feeling down but a lighthearted romp among screwball writers in the 1920’s would cure you? Try the third book in J.J. Murphy’s Dorothy Parker series, A Friendly Game of Murder. Dorothy Parker, poet and satirist, and her fellow Algonquin Round Table companions, a group of New York City writers, critics, actors and wits, were famous for their biting wisecracks and wordplay. Murphy continues this tradition in his entertaining mysteries.
A girl is drowned and her throat cut in the baths of Herod’s palace in 28 CE. Using traditional Talmudic reasoning, Rabbi Gamaliel tracks down the killer without slowing down the fast paced action.
Winner Announcement: Sarah of the blog Reading the Past has won the signed copy of Heath’s A Thing Done.
Do you love the internecine, flamboyant world of Dante’s Florence? Knightly honor manipulated by a deadly woman sound like a great starting place for a plot? Then you’ll enjoy Tinney Sue Heath’s A Thing Done.
Westerson writes “medieval noir” with a sense of humor and a solid base of history, featuring Crispin Guest, a disgraced medieval knight, now The Tracker, a medieval version of a private detective.
When we think of internment camps and WWII, we don’t think of California, Arizona and Utah, but we should. Sophie Littlefield’s upcoming book, Garden of Stones, which moves between WWII and the 1970’s and follows three generations of women, draws us into this shameful chapter of US history after the bombing of Pearl Harbor—the rounding up, financial ruin, and forcible detention of Japanese Americans in desolate camps.
Author speaking in Phoenix 1/27 at Temple Emanuel. Coming of age story of a prominent rabbi’s daughter in 3rd century CE Babylon and Israel; full of incantations, sorcery and women’s customs.
Priscilla Royal has brought her fine historical and story-telling skills to a heartbreaking and complex period in medieval England: the treatment of Jews under Edward I. Murders, a love story, and mob violence make for a good mystery.
