Stand-out historical novels to read now: The Pretender By Jo Harkin, The Golden Hour By Kate Lord Brown, The Midnight Carousel By Fiza Saeed McLynn
It's 1480, and England is undergoing a particularly thorny patch as the warring factions of Lancaster and York look to the throne, fight bloody battles, imprison princes in the tower and indulge in mayhem and machinations in the quest for power.
Meanwhile in a quiet little hamlet, naive, endearing ten-year-old farmer's son John Collan is about to have his life upended.
He's taken from his home by canny political operators and transformed into Lambert Simnel, a pseudonym for his 'real' identity – Edward Plantagenet, who'll become king of England once Henry VII is disposed of.
Ambitious, mischievous and well written, Jo Harkin's stand-out second novel's boldly drawn characters and their ruthless aspirations make for an entertaining read.
The Golden Hour By Kate Lord Brown (Simon and Schuster £18.99, 448pp)
Heady and romantic, Kate Lord Brown's escapist tale heads to 1939 Cairo in the company of gilded, headstrong Juno Munro and handsome, intuitive Max Aeberhardt as they search for the tomb of the legendary queen Nefertiti on an archaeological dig.
Heat, dust and forbidden passion play their part in this swoony story, but there's also a stalwart friendship alongside the sexual tension – one based on long-held secrets, as Lucie Fitzgerald discovers when she visits her dying mother Polly in 1970s Beirut.
Best friends with Juno since childhood, Polly slowly unspools the tragic story of Juno, her whirlwind marriage to troubled Alec and her overwhelming obsession with Max who, like an old-style Hollywood hero, declares of their love: 'We redraw the maps. We realign the stars' with the Valley of the Kings as a backdrop.
The Midnight Carousel By Fiza Saeed McLynn (Michael Joseph £16.99, 368pp)
There's a dark, magical glimmer to this enthralling debut from Fiza Saeed McLynn, which opens in 1900 in a foundry workshop in Paris as grieving carousel maker Gilbert Cloutier hurries to finish his beautiful, uncanny masterpiece in time for the city's Great Exhibition.
Ensconced in the wilds of Essex, living in rural poverty, outsider Maisie Marlowe is fascinated by a flyer for the mysterious carousel, little realising that it'll play a central role in her intrepid story.
In a series of quietly discombobulating events, she ends up in prohibition-era Chicago, helping to run an amusement park, where Cloutier's strange merry-go-round seems linked to the unsolved disappearances of people in both France and America.
It adds an eerie edge to an already beguiling tale of a brave woman claiming her hard-won happiness against the odds.
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