Smart, Splendid New Historical Fiction

New York Times

30-05-2025

The Pretender
John Collan is about to have an epic identity crisis. Wrenched out of his placid life in rural late-15th-century Oxfordshire, he's informed by his new, very secretive overlords that he's not a 10-year-old peasant but Edward, Earl of Warwick, nephew of King Richard, and thus in the line of succession to the English throne. But England is also undergoing a violent identity crisis as the Plantagenets skirmish among themselves and Henry Tudor schemes to take power. So John (temporarily renamed Lambert Simons) must remain in the shadows, where his long-dead father is said to have hidden him, lest he succumb to the dire fate of other potential heirs.
Inspired by the historical figure known as Lambert Simnel, THE PRETENDER (Knopf, 471 pp., $30) is a rollicking account of a befuddled boy's pillar-to-post existence as a political pawn. After clandestine tutoring to provide him with a suitable education, he's whisked to Flanders to be further polished at the court of his supposed aunt, then abruptly shipped to Ireland, where the Earl of Kildare will ready him to be the figurehead of a rebel army. Faced with such a future, John/Lambert/Edward can only remind himself, 'a king wouldn't be trying not to cry.'
Becoming a teenager is hard enough. But try becoming a teenager who hasn't the faintest idea who he really is and feels responsible for the murders of some of the few people he has come to trust. Longing simply to escape into anonymity, he's advised instead to 'get yourself a courtly countenance. Courtly claws, courtly teeth.' And so, in desperation, he does.
Fifteen Wild Decembers
What Emily Brontë calls 'the push-pull' of her turbulent family is the subject of Powell's suitably brooding FIFTEEN WILD DECEMBERS (Europa, 288 pp., paperback, $18). We first encounter Powell's imagined Emily in 1824 when she is sent to join her sisters at the boarding school that will later figure in Charlotte's novel, 'Jane Eyre.' But all 6-year-old Emily wants is to return to the Yorkshire moors that 'are as familiar to me as the features of my own siblings.'
Narrating this account of her brief life, Emily provides a sharp perspective on the penury and isolation that created such anguish — and such inspiration — for the Brontë sisters. Tensions between them flare, as does frustration with their feckless brother, Branwell. Foremost, though, is Emily's yearning for the 'wild freedom' she knew as a child, a yearning that will color her novel, 'Wuthering Heights.' Sent to Brussels with Charlotte for more schooling, she chafes at the restrictions of polite society: 'I did not belong in this world and even if I could find the words to describe it, these people could never understand mine.'
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