Secondhand Historical Fiction Bargain Book Box SP4264

Secondhand Historical Fiction Bargain Book Box SP4264

Seventeen historical novels ranging from Viking raids to the gulag: Philippa Gregory’s The Red Queen, Schindler’s List, Cilka’s Journey, Kate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden, The Bronze Horseman, two Barbara Erskines, Diana Gabaldon, Melvyn Bragg and David Lodge. Love stories, war stories and time-slips, with two Booker-level books among the page-turners.

1. The Red Queen — Philippa Gregory — Margaret Beaufort is married at twelve, a mother at thirteen, and certain that God wants her son on the throne of England. The Wars of the Roses seen from the Lancaster side.
2. Raven: Blood Eye — Giles Kristian — A boy with one blood-red eye and no memory is carried off by Norse raiders and finds he belongs with them. Bernard Cornwell called this debut astonishing.
3. The Matchbox Girl — Alice Jolly — A girl who doesn’t speak is sent to a Vienna children’s hospital in the 1930s, where the doctors study children like her. Then the Nazis arrive with their own ideas about such children.
4. Cilka’s Journey — Heather Morris — Cilka survived Auschwitz at sixteen, and the Soviets then sentenced her to fifteen years in a Siberian camp for how she had survived. The sequel to The Tattooist of Auschwitz, based on a real woman.
5. The Warrior’s Princess — Barbara Erskine — Jess flees to a cottage in Wales after an attack, and begins to hear a child’s voice from Roman times. It belongs to the daughter of the captured British king Caratacus.
6. The Soldier’s Return — Melvyn Bragg — Sam comes home to a small Cumbrian town in 1946 after years of fighting in Burma. His wife has learned to manage without him, and his son doesn’t know him. A quiet and truthful novel.
7. The Hidden Dance — Susan Wooldridge — In 1933 a woman escapes a violent marriage by boarding an ocean liner with the man she loves, travelling under a false name. The first novel by the actress.
8. The Mysterium — Paul Doherty — London, 1304: a killer the city thought long dead is striking again, and the king’s clerk Sir Hugh Corbett is ordered to find him. A medieval whodunnit.
9. The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye — Briony Cameron — A young shipwright in the Caribbean of the 1650s is forced to flee her home and becomes one of the few women ever to captain a pirate ship. Drawn from a real legend.
10. Daughters of Fire — Barbara Erskine — A historian writing about Cartimandua, the Celtic queen who betrayed a rebel to Rome, finds the queen’s story taking over her life. A time-slip novel that moves between two eras.
11. Treachery — Julian Stockwin — Thomas Kydd, disgraced and sent to the Channel Islands, has to win his name back among smugglers and spies. A Napoleonic sea adventure by a former naval officer.
12. Schindler’s List — Thomas Keneally — Oskar Schindler, a drinker, womaniser and war profiteer, spent his entire fortune saving more than a thousand Jews. The Booker Prize winner first published as Schindler’s Ark.
13. A Man of Parts — David Lodge — H.G. Wells at the end of his life looks back on his books, his prophecies and a remarkable number of love affairs. A novel built from the facts, and very funny about fame.
14. The Bronze Horseman — Paullina Simons — Leningrad, June 1941: Tatiana meets a Red Army officer on the day war is declared, and he is already involved with her sister. Then the siege begins. A love story readers reread for years.
15. Legacy of the Runes — Christina Courtenay — A time-slip romance in which a Viking-age object links a modern life to one a thousand years earlier. From an author who has won awards for the genre.
16. The Forgotten Garden — Kate Morton — In 1913 a small girl is found alone on an Australian wharf with a suitcase and a book of fairy tales. Decades later her granddaughter inherits a cottage in Cornwall and the mystery with it.
17. Lord John and the Private Matter — Diana Gabaldon — London, 1757: Lord John Grey notices something alarming about his cousin’s fiancé and is then handed a murder to solve. A spin-off from Outlander that works without it.