Posts tagged with fiction

Two time travelers from a future world arrive in 1815 to retrieve a lost manuscript and letters by Jane Austen. They are forbidden to change the past, but as they come to know Austen and her family, they decide to try to save her life. Whether they succeed or not, I will not say, but this is a suspenseful and thought-provoking novel, an intriguing combination of science fiction and Jane Austen spin-off.

The Duke's Children is the last novel in Anthony Trollope's Palliser series, about Parliamentary politics in Victorian England. It's a classical story of generational conflict, as the Duke of Omnium, former Prime Minister, struggles to come to terms with his three grown children's choices in love and politics.

In Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin, author of the Earthsea series and many other works of science fiction and fantasy, gives voice to a forgotten character from Virgil's Aeneid. Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus of Latium, rejects all her suitors because of a prophecy that says she's destined to marry a foreigner. When Aeneas and his fellow survivors of the Fall of Troy arrive in Latium, she knows he is the man she's meant to marry, but one of her suitors, Turnus, has other ideas, and they fight a war over her--a war she never wanted. Le Guin writes beautifully of ancient Italy, and especially of its religious rites and ceremonies.

This historical novel, originally published in 1936, tells the story of Luisa Sanfelice, an impoverished noblewoman in Naples, Italy, at the time of the French Revolution. When revolutionaries briefly take over Naples and overthrow the king and queen, Luisa, a woman of no strong political beliefs, inadvertently becomes a heroine of the revolution when she warns her revolutionary lover about a royalist plot to re-take the city. Much violence ensues, and Sheean's descriptions are not for the squeamish. But Sanfelice makes for a compelling read. The heroine's story has been told several other times, most notably by Alexandre Dumas.

In this third mystery in Donna Leon's long-running series set in Venice, Commissario Guido Brunetti investigates the murder of a transvestite whose face was damaged beyond recognition. It turns out that the victim was one of Venice's most prominent bankers, and Brunetti uncovers a scandal involving financial fraud and illegally rented apartments. Meanwhile, he longs to solve the case quickly to avoid becoming the next victim and to escape the heat of August in Venice and join his wife Paola and teenage children on vacation in the mountains. As usual with Leon, the book features Paola's mouth-watering meals, and Brunetti does some cooking for himself this time.

Glass Houses is the latest entry in Louise Penny’s long-running mystery series featuring Chief Superintendent Armand Gamache of the Sûreté de Québec, who lives in the tiny village of Three Pines. After Three Pines' Halloween party, a mysterious figure in a black cloak haunts the village green. Two days later, the figure disappears, but the body of a woman, a visitor to Three Pines, is found wearing the cloak. The story of the murder alternates with the trial of the person accused of it, several months later. Meanwhile, Gamache is trying to capture the head of the most powerful drug cartel in Québec. There is, of course, a connection between the drug trade and the murder in Three Pines, but part of the suspense is figuring out what it is.

Ancient Roman detective Flavia Albia has been hired by palace officials working for the paranoid emperor Domitian to investigate a conspiracy involving a man who pretends to be the emperor Nero. Meanwhile, the newly-married Flavia cares for her husband, who's survived being struck by lightning but has never been the same since, and contends with a series of domestic troubles.

In this complex historical novel, Sarah Dunant tells the story of the infamous Borgia family of Renaissance Italy from several points of view, including the family's patriarch, Pope Alexander VI, and his two illegitimate children, Cesare, the leader of a mercenary army, and Lucrezia, who journeys to the court of Ferrara to marry the duke's heir, while grieving for her previous husband, who was murdered at her brother's orders. A fascinating new point of view is that of Niccolò Machiavelli, a young Florentine diplomat at Cesare's court.

In this stunning historical novel, Margaret George tells the story of the infamous Roman emperor Nero in a completely new way. This Nero is not the mad tyrant who fiddled while Rome burned, as seen in so many Hollywood films. Instead, he is a young man, an artist and athlete, trying to survive in the treacherous world of dynastic politics in imperial Rome.

Ancient Roman private eye Marcus Didius Falco tries to prevent a murder from happening. A "professional bride", Severina Zotica, has been married three times, and each of her husbands has died in suspicious circumstances. Now she's about to marry a fourth husband, a former slave who has made a fortune in real estate, and the members of his household are certain that she killed her first three husbands, and she will try to kill him. Can Falco save the man's life?