HISTORICAL FICTION
ROUND-UP
In 1518 a woman began to
dance in a Strasbourg square.
For days she continued and
was joined by hundreds of
others. During this “dancing
mania”, some danced until
they dropped dead. It is
against this extraordinary
backdrop that Kiran
Millwood Hargrave’s
enthralling The Dance Tree
(Picador £14.99) is set.
Lisbet Wiler, its central
character, lives with her
husband and his mother
on a bee farm near the city.
Pregnant again, after a series
of traumatic miscarriages, she
is unsettled by the return of
her sister-in-law Agnethe from
occasionally meanders, but
Privilege conjures up a society
in which written words can
be as dangerous as deeds.
The Irish novelist and
film-maker Neil Jordanresurrects a revolutionary era
with great panache.
Mute from his birth in 1815
in the small town of Heron’s
Creek, Georgia, Yip Tolroy,
the narrator of Paddy
Crewe’s My Name Is Yip
(Doubleday £14.99), grows up
in isolation, looked after by
his troubled mother and
taught to read and write by an
itinerant doctor who pitches
up in town. In his teens, a
sudden act of violence forces
Yip from Heron’s Creek and,
with a new companion, he
embarks on a perilous
odyssey through the South.
Crewe has created for his
debut novel a memorable
hero — one who cannot speak,
but is nonetheless an eloquent
voice on the page.
In Derek B Miller’s How
to Find Your Way in the Dark
(Doubleday £16.99), Sheldon
Horowitz is an equally
remarkable central character.
When not yet 13, he loses his
mother in a cinema fire and is
travelling with his father when
a truck forces their vehicle
off the road. His father dies
in what is assumed to be an
accident, but Sheldon is
convinced it was murder.
Struggling to readjust to a
new life with his uncle and
cousins, left-wing Abe and
beautiful Mirabelle, he plots
revenge on those he believes
killed his father. As Sheldon’s
plans unfold, Miller’s story is
alternately very funny and
piercingly sad. cyears of exile for an unnamed
crime. As people succumb to
the dancing madness, Lisbet
learns more of Agnethe’s fall
from grace and the peril in
which she still stands. Like
her first novel for adults, The
Mercies, Hargrave’s second
provides an exceptionally
atmospheric, original story.
The events in Guinevere
Glasfurd’s Privilege (Two
Roads £18.99) take place
mostly in Louis XV’s France.
Delphine Vimond is forced to
flee from Rouen to Paris when
her father is imprisoned for
possessing banned books.
She meets the philosopher
Denis Diderot and becomes
his housekeeper. A young
Englishman, Chancery Smith,
visits with a controversial
manuscript that he wrongly
believes to be Diderot’s work.
Dismissed by the philosopher,
he joins forces with Delphine
in a nationwide quest for the
true author, which leads them
into conflict with powerful
censors of subversive
literature. Glasfurd’s plotcreates a vivid new
perspective on one of his
nation’s martyred heroes in
The Ballad of Lord Edward
and Citizen Small (Head of
Zeus £18.99). Lord Edward
Fitzgerald is the younger son
of the Duke of Leinster, born
into privilege. Tony Small, an
escaped slave from Carolina,
encounters him, near to
death, on a battlefield
during the American War of
Independence and nurses
him back to health. Small
becomes his manservant and
through his eyes we witness
Fitzgerald’s journey from
soldier for King George to
doomed leader of the failed
Irish Rebellion of 1798. JordanFICTION
Francesca Angelini
Bad Relations
by Cressida Connolly
Viking £14.99 pp288
Towards the end of Bad
Relations a character is struck
by a realisation: “A family
consisted of elders long
buried, as well as the living:
stories were the bridges that
connected the generations.”
No prizes for enlightening
thought here then. However,
the observation cuts to the
meat of Cressida Connolly’s
third novel.
Bad Relations spans
160 years and multiple
generations of one family.
Fever tree Uncontrollable
moves in 1500s StrasbourgA compelling family saga of sex, war — and dropping acid
Dance till
you drop
Nick Rennison is captivated by an
enthralling tale of medieval mass hysteria
DANIELA ALFIERIWhich means a heck of a lot of
these connecting bridges.
We begin in Crimea in 1855
with the officer William Gale
cutting hair from the flopping
head of his freshly dead
younger brother. In her
previous books Connolly
established herself as a writer
with a flair for historical
detail. And so it proves here.
At one siege the Russians
invite their women to
picnic with parasols and
champagne on a hillside
overlooking a massacre.
The carnage of war drips
off the pages.
Whenever William
writes to his wife, Alice,
back in England,
though, it’s all talk
of “smiling fertile”
valleys, pleasantswims and Fortnum & Mason
hampers. You sense how
keenly he needs to hang on to
the notion that war is a noble
undertaking. The chinks in
his marriage weather into a
chasm after he returns home
and listens to Alice repeatedly
questioning the wisdom of the
Crimean campaign, even after
he’s awarded the Victoria
Cross. Yet just as we’re sucked
into the nitty gritty of
these storms and the
explosive potential
of adultery inVictorian times, it’s goodbye
to them and over to Stephen
in Cornwall in 1977. Bridges,
more bridges.
Still, Stephen is good
company. The young
Australian — “he had a lot on
his mind” — has come to
spend summer with the
Clarkes, a family he shares a
mutual ancestor with, William
Gale. The dysfunctional
Clarkes fortunately have more
space to grow than poor Alice
and Will. And Connolly has
a lot of fun with them,
especially the matriarch Celia,
queen of the takedown. “Well,
at least I had a family. People
who were quelqu’un. Not just
civil servants from Solihull,”
she snaps at her husband.
Their two daughters are
mesmerisingly beautiful, andhappen to have a gorgeous
girlfriend staying with them.
Add in a laissez-faire Seventies
approach to parenting and
there’s not much left for these
teenagers to do except drop
acid, shag and cool off in
streams. Yet dark foreboding
does much to dampen this
halycon summer. “Claws.
Upside-down claws, dead
claws” are etched on
Stephen’s mind after he
forgets to shut the chickens in.
Subtlety isn’t always
a strength here, but the
dramatic climax, when it
comes, is nicely done. And
even if Bad Relations is a little
uneven, Connolly ultimately
does a good job of sketching
out a compellingly full family
saga in under 300 pages —
which is a big ask. cHISTORICAL FICTION
BOOK
OF THE
MONTHBridge-builder
Author Cressida
ConnollyDESIREE ADAMS22 May 2022 27