Nick Rennison selects this year’s best historical fiction
The Victorian era continues to attract historical novelists, and Elizabeth Macneal’s The Doll Factory (Picador) was one of the year’s most impressive excursions into 19th-century London. Iris Whittle escapes the drudgery of her daily work when she catches the eye of Pre-Raphaelite painter Louis Frost and becomes both his model and his mistress. Meanwhile, sinister taxidermist Silas Reed’s obsession with Iris grows ever more dangerous. Macneal’s lively tale searchingly examines the restrictions placed on women and the possessiveness of men, both well-meaning and malign.
Set at the end of the 18th century, The Warlow Experiment (Serpent’s Tail) by Alix Nathan tells the story of Herbert Powyss, a country gentleman with an interest in science, who devises an extraordinary experiment. He will pay a man to live for seven years in total isolation. But how will his subject cope with solitude? Nathan’s unsettling novel charts the progress of Powyss’s bizarre experiment.
A 1920s cult, awaiting Christ’s Second Coming in the suburban homes of Bedford, is the unlikely subject matter for Claire McGlasson’s debut novel, The Rapture (Faber). The Panacea Society was a real-life sect whose last member died as recently as 2012. McGlasson’s fictional account of rivalries within its ranks, and one young acolyte’s attempt to break free, provides a touching story of delusion, misplaced faith and the power of an unexpected love affair.
Moving many centuries further back, To Calais, in Ordinary Time (Canongate) by James Meek is set in 1348, as the Black Death reached England. Three very different characters find their fates entwined as they make their way to the south coast. Berna is a nobleman’s daughter in flight from the marriage her father is imposing on her; Will Quate is a young ploughman-turned-archer en route to the wars in France; and Thomas is an intellectual man of religion. In Meek’s linguistically inventive novel, they must all confront their own mortality as the plague approaches.
Westerns are often dismissed as pulp fiction but, at its best, the genre can produce truly memorable novels. John Larison’s Whiskey When We’re Dry (No Exit Press) follows the fortunes of teenager Jessilyn Harney, who dons male dress and sets off to track down her long-lost brother, a legendary gun-slinging outlaw. As Jess recounts her adventures in her own compelling voice, Larison uses the traditional western form to explore very contemporary ideas about identity and gender.
Nick Rennison is the author of (Corvus)