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==Historical fiction==
{{newreview
|author=John Wilcox
|title=The Shangani Patrol
|rating=4
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=This is the latest in the adventures of Simon Fonthill, a cross between a Victorian James Bond and Indianna Jones. Although one of a series, it stands alone as a novel. It's steeped in the history (and there's a lot of it) of the late 19th century when Queen Victoria 'ruled the world.'
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755345614</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Terence Morgan
|summary=Since the release of ''Gladiator'', Roman life has been a growth industry in the entertainment world, with even ''Doctor Who'' visiting Pompeii at one point. The last time I visited Roman times in written form was when I was still doing Latin at school. Fortunately, Ben Kane's ''The Forgotten Legion'' is far more engrossing than school ever was.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848090102</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Samantha Hunt
|title=The Invention of Everything Else
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Nikola Tesla, born in 1856, was a young engineering student in Croatia, a Serb with a ferocious talent for invention when he sailed to America armed only with a note of introduction from his former employer to Thomas Edison which said: ''I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man.'' Promised prodigious amounts of money to reorganise Edison's workshops, he was in the end cheated by Edison, who made a joke about the American sense of humour when Tesla asked to be paid.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099524007</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Terri Wiltshire
|title=Carry Me Home
|rating=4
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=1904. Alabama. A white girl is raped by a black man, a hobo from the last train through town. The townsfolk are up in arms.
The opening to ''Carry Me Home'' is so reminiscent of the novel I read immediately before it ([[Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman|Scottsboro]]) that I worried I might be in for a re-run. I was worried because Scottsboro is perfect, and any imitator is bound to fail. I worried unnecessarily. The starting premise aside, the two books have nothing at all in common.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>023071448X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John Boyne
|title=The House of Special Purpose
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=There must have been countless people reading the book after watching the film made from [[The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne|The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas]] and wondering what John Boyne was going to do next, with no idea he had already done something else - the brilliant ribaldry of [[Mutiny on the Bounty by John Boyne|Mutiny on the Bounty]]. If nothing else the pair showed up the chameleonic brilliance of this young author.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0385616066</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Caroline Rance
|title=Kill-Grief
|rating=4.5
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=Mary Helsall began work as a nurse in Chester in 1756, but she was rather impatient and caring for others didn't come naturally to her. Her solution was gin and oblivion - and a volatile relationship with a hospital porter, but it was only when a diseased beggar came to the hospital for treatment that it became clear that Mary had secrets to hide.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0955861349</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ellen Feldman
|title=Scottsboro
|rating=5
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=The quote is ascribed to Haywood Patterson, one of the Scottsboro boys. With Feldman's magic, it's hard to know whether the quote is true, or is part of the fiction. That's the difficulty when you tell stories that rely for their power on the truth of the events on which they're based. How much is the reader to believe?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330456148</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Manil Suri
|title=The Age of Shiva
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Shiva might be the Destroyer in the Hindu trinity which gives us Brahma as the creator and Vishnu as the preserver, but life is never that simple. It is never made explicit what ''The Age of Shiva'' refers to in the title of the novel. Who is the analogical Shiva who wreaks such destruction on the lives we encounter?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0747596395</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Julia Stoneham
|title=Muddy Boots and Silk Stockings
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=During the Second World War many women in Britain were seeing their men leave them to go and fight, but Alice Todd finds herself abandoned by her husband for a younger woman. She has to find a way to support herself and her young son, Edward, so she applies for the post of Warden on a farm, taking care of a group of young women working as Land Girls. Mostly the horrors and tragedies of war seem very distant to the girls as they struggle more with the horrors of sharing bath water, their blisters from hard farm work and living in a cold, isolated farmhouse. However, even here they find that they aren't protected from the hostilities, and the tragedies that enter their lives serve to bring them closer together as a make-shift family.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0749079096</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Anna Richards
|title=Little Gods
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Forty-seven days into the war, long before the Luftwaffe came anywhere near our capital, an explosion wrecked the house in which Eugenia (Jean) had suffered her first nineteen years.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>033046440X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ann Weisgarber
|title=The Personal History of Rachel DuPree
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Do you remember reading ''The Red Pony'' at school? If you shed tears at John Steinbeck's short masterpiece, be sure to find time for this story of rural hardship from new American author, Ann Weisgarber. I thought 'The Personal History of Rachel DuPree' was a stunning read, with more than a nod at Steinbeck, yet enough distance to place the writer in her own territory. The two settings, Chicago and South Dakota, convinced me of their authenticity immediately. The family grabbed my sympathy from the opening scene and every character was satisfyingly 3-D. Unsurprising, then, that this novel took seven years to write.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330458558</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jo Graham
|title=Hand of Isis
|rating=4
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=Once long ago, three sisters were born in the same year. All were children of the Pharaoh Ptolemy Auletes, the eldest born to a serving woman, the middle to his Queen, the youngest to a slave from Thrace, who died in childbirth. The middle child, of little consequence when born, being the forth legitimate child of the Pharaoh and a girl, would one day become Egypt's most famous Queen. Her name was Cleopatra.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1841497002</amazonuk>
}}
