Tag: historical fiction

Bologna, 1575.

A talented seamstress

A powerful merchant

A fierce battle of wills

Elena Morandi has gained a fragile foothold in the workshop of a master tailor, despite the profession being officially barred to her as a woman. But then a powerful man from her past crosses her path and threatens everything she has worked for. Antonio della Fontana has every corner of the city in his pocket and, as Elena knows all too well, he abused his position of power at the Baraccano orphanage. Driven to fight for justice against a man seemingly above the law, Elena hatches a plan to get retribution for herself, a lost friend and those still prey to Fontana’s abuses.

With sumptuous detail that brings the sights, sounds and textures of Renaissance Italy to vivid life, City of Silk is a breathtaking historical fiction debut.

My thoughts: I loved this, I’m a huge fan of historical fiction, history and Italy. So this was directly up my street. Inspired by art hanging in the National Gallery, both by 16th Century Italian artists, and of ordinary people from that time.

Elena just wants to be a tailor like her father was, and having been through the trauma of losing both her parents and being sent to an abusive orphanage, where the benefactor would choose girls to sexually assault, with essentially the blessing of the staff, and where her best friend Laura chose to end her life rather than be forced to continue to submit to this monster, I felt like Elena deserved to find some happiness.

She was working for a seamstress, making clothes for the wives of Bologna’s great and good, but on hearing a marriage contract was being drawn up, she flees into the city and makes her way to the tailors’ quarter, hoping to find a master who might take pity on her.

In many ways Elena is very lucky in her friends, in the bonds she forms as she works for the Maestro alongside his teasing journeymen. She’s talented and capable and they see that. She and her friend Sofia (properly called Suhailah), kidnapped and enslaved, find freedom in their friendships with the artist family, the Carraccis, who invite them into their studio.

It is with these friends that she plots an audacious scheme, to expose Antonio della Fontana as a rapist, molester and monster. On his daughter’s wedding day, in front of the whole city. Revenge will be sweet but she doesn’t reckon with the city’s short attention span. 

Some of her friends, like Maestro Rondinelli are outsiders as much as she and Sofia are, he’s gay, in a time where there could get you killed, and even Elena struggles to understand why he would risk everything, until she realises the importance of love. Something she doesn’t really see in the marriages around her, arranged as they are to maintain wealth and status. I think the outsider status of the characters is important, Fontana is the ultimate insider, wealthy and influential. Until he isn’t. But there’s nowhere for him amidst those he disregards.

The only off note was that Elena never explained why she wanted to be a tailor and dress the city’s men instead of dressing the women. If I remember correctly from history books, men did tend to dress more sumptuously at this time, displaying their wealth through their clothes, while women were required to be more muted and demure. Think peacocks and peahens. But it would have been nice to see her thinking. I know there’s an emotional connection to her father, but as she could never work under her own name, and he doesn’t appear to have been well known, it was a little confusing.

Overall this is a splendid tale of outsiders, friendship, revenge and taking back power from those who would exploit it. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.

Alice Arden, idealistic and wealthy beauty, burnt at the stake for killing her husband, the former mayor of Faversham in Kent. But was she really the one responsible for the most scandalous murder of the sixteenth century?

William Shakespeare, England’s greatest playwright, born thirteen years after Alice’s execution. Why does his first-ever play, written about this murder, not bear his name?

This is a story of two people – one reviled, one revered – whose fates become linked in a tale of corruption, collusion and conspiracy. Based on historical documents and recently published academic research, Arden unveils shocking new evidence about the murder of Thomas Arden and reveals, for the first time, a remarkable new theory about Shakespeare’s early years.

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I have written four novels in the last eight years under the penname GD Harper.

My last novel, The Maids of Biddenden, the imagined biography of real-life conjoined twins born in 12th-century Kent, was featured on BBC TV News and was the winner of the Next Generation Indie
Book Awards in the historical fiction category, shortlisted for the 2022 Selfie Award at the London Book Fair, and shortlisted or longlisted for five other awards.

It has over a thousand ratings on Amazon UK and Goodreads, with an average score of 4.3. Across the major Amazon markets, it reached number sixteen in overall paid-for e-book sales, number two in historical fiction and number one in medieval historical fiction.

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My thoughts: I am a bit of a Shakespeare nerd, I’ve read most of his plays and poems over the years and studied him at uni. Somewhere I still have an essay on sexism in Hamlet. So I was really excited to read this book which brings the real life murder that inspired his first play and his life as an actor and jobbing playwright to life.

Alice Arden was burnt at the stake for the murder of her husband in Faversham, Kent, and it is this crime and the fact thaat victim and convicted shared the last name of his mother that inspire Will to write his first play, a play only about forty years after the fact, something that wasn’t done in those days for fear of prosecution and being banned by the Master of the Revels from performing it.

But Will persevered, he edited it and published it without adding his name so it could be performed and then his career as a writer began. After the Arden murder, he would delve into history and produce his incredible works, still performed and loved today, something he never could have imagined.

But this is also Alice’s story, that of a young woman essentially sold into a loveless marriage, who found escape in her affair with a tailor, who conspired with him and others who disliked her high handed husband, to kill him and try to make it look like a stranger had, although as he was wearing his slippers and found only metres from his home, badly done.

Alice suffered horribly before she was eventually burnt alive. The other conspirators were also executed, including her lover and the household servants. This fictional Alice is never entirely sold on the necessity of murdering her husband, unhappy as she was, but is talked into it.

Her unhappiness is reflected in that of Will’s wife Anne, raising three children in Stratford, relying on Will making enough money in the theatres to keep them fed and housed.

The author has clearly done an incredible amount of research and brings Tudor England vividly to life along with his characters. I was completely entertained and spotted lots of references and little snippets of the Shakespeares’ history that added to the realism (like his twins being named for his friend Hamnet and wife Judith) that I learnt in my own studies.

I didn’t know about the Arden murder, and it too is really fascinating. Women were chattel and many ended up in lonely marriages like Alice. Whatever her involvement in her husband’s death, she was clearly not willing to just put up with her situation and tried to change things, however misguided.

A thoroughly enjoyable read, I loved the insights into 16th century justice and the world of play writing.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.

Young and beautiful Gytha Godwinson is the envy of England when her father Harold seizes the country’s crown in early 1066. Soon triumph turns to terror as an evil star appears, heralding the end of an era and a new beginning for Britain. Her family seems cursed, but even as she suffers loss, betrayal and humiliation, Gytha is determined to regain what is rightfully hers.

In a stunning re-telling of 1066, international bestselling author Ellen Alpsten has created a captivating new heroine in Gytha Godwinson. While women were limited to their roles as ‘cup-bearer’, ‘peace-weaver’ and ‘memory-keeper’, Gytha dared the unprecedented and writes world history. Lose yourself in a bewitching blend of myth and modernity and join the daughter of England’s true House of Dragon’s fight for freedom.  

Ellen Alpsten was born and raised in the Kenyan highlands and holds a MSc from the IEP de Paris. 

She worked as a News-Anchor for Bloomberg TV London before writing fulltime. 

Her debut novel ‘Tsarina’ was widely translated and shortlisted for numerous awards. 

‘The Last Princess’ is the first book in her new trilogy.’

My thoughts: Going back to Britain just before the Norman Conquest, Gytha Godwinson is the eldest daughter of Harold, later, briefly, the king and most famous for getting an arrow in the eye.

After her father is deposed and killed by the Norman’s, led by William the Bastard (later the Conqueror) Gytha and her brothers Edmond and Magnus flee to their kinsman in Denmark. However things are not straightforward there, as Sweyn, the king and their cousin, has married the widow of one of their father’s enemies, who he killed in battle.

Gytha is treated like a thrall (a slave) and expected to help around the settlement, doing chores and fetching and carrying, despite being a princess.

Life was not easy in 1066 and discovering that Tora (the queen) is actively working against them and against the new Christian religion, Gytha, her brothers and her new friend Amira, must find a way to survive and plan their escape.

Clever and enjoyable, this was a window into the past, and into another world. The first in a new series, I don’t remember Gytha ever being mentioned in history lessons at school so I look forward to learning more about her and her life in the next book.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.