Bookshelf, Spring 2025

I don’t know about you, but winter here in the Mid-Atlantic states was a beast. Most of the predictions for snow and ice, fortunately, didn’t pan out in the end, but I can’t remember the last January and February with so many days below freezing. So it’s no wonder that, mere hours after the Spring Equinox, I am celebrating the arrival of the new season with abandon. This season’s bookshelf includes new-to-me authors as well as new series by writers whose works I’ve long appreciated, and although I do read books that are not historical fiction, every one of these is. Three come from authors I expect to interview for the New Books Network before summer rolls around, two from authors I talked with about earlier works, and the sixth appeared here on the blog just a few months ago.

There are actually a few other titles on my to-be-read list as well, but I’ll write about those a few months from now, as they won’t come out before the summer.

Alka Joshi, Six Days in Bombay (MIRA, April 2025)

Sona Falstaff, a hospital nurse in Bombay, has things more or less where she wants them. Yes, she faces discrimination, both positive and negative, because of her mixed heritage. She lives in a poor section of the city, and she must work to support herself and her aging mother. India itself is a state of flux as the British Raj comes to an end and demands for independence increase. But all in all, Sona wants nothing more than to cling to the job and the life she knows.

Yet the admission to the hospital of Mira Novak, a painter, upends Sona’s carefully constructed world. Mira’s vibrancy, passion, and generosity awaken a yearning to explore that Sona didn’t even know she had. Then, just as she begins to cherish the possibility of friendship, Mira dies, six days after entering the hospital. And she leaves Sona with a mission, one that will force her to confront a past she would much rather not remember.

I expect to talk with Alka Joshi about this and her previous novels on the New Books Network in April 2025.

Joanna Lowell, A Rare Find (Berkley, June 2025)

I stumbled over Joanna Lowell’s romances about Victorian artists with 2023’s Artfully Yours and was instantly hooked by its combination of the supercilious art critic Alan De’Ath and Nina Finch, a reluctant art forger/would-be baker (complete with marmoset). So hooked that I read the other three novels in that series and was therefore prepared for last year’s spinoff, A Shore Thing, featuring Muriel Pendrake and Kit Griffith—two characters from the series who combine romance with self-discovery, given that Kit is a trans man and Muriel the survivor of a “perfect” marriage that didn’t meet her needs. Even before A Shore Thing made The New York Times’ 2024 short list of best romances, the author and I talked about the novel on the New Books Network. You can find out more about that, as well as our written Q&A about Artfully Yours, in this earlier post here on the blog.

Lowell’s latest historical romance, set during England’s Regency period, pairs Elfreda Marsden with Georgie Redmayne, a nonbinary character, and the link is a Viking amulet lost during a chance collision between the two early in the novel. The amulet comes from Elfreda’s family estate and proves that Vikings once camped there, so its loss undermines her hopes for a career in archeology. To atone for this mistake, Georgie agrees to help Elfreda find a lost Viking treasure that will substitute for the missing amulet as the proof Elfreda needs. Naturally, sparks fly despite the long-running feud between Marsdens and Redmaynes.…

Mimi Matthews, Rules for Ruin (Berkley, May 2025).

Mimi Matthews is both a prolific and a gifted author. As recently as November 2024, I interviewed her here on this blog about The Muse of Maiden Lane, the last in her Belles of London series. Less than two months from now, Rules for Ruin, the first in her new Crinoline Academy series, will hit the shelves.

Like its predecessors, Rules for Ruin is a historical romance set in Victorian England, but it has a darker edge, verging on espionage—which makes it all the more appealing from my standpoint. It features Euphemia (Effie) Flite—a woman of twenty-three who has no clear memory of the time before she came to the Benevolent Academy for the Betterment of Young Ladies in Epping Forest, aka the Crinoline Academy—and Gabriel Royce, a slum lad turned into slum lord, determined to make life better for others like himself. For that, he needs the support of Lord Compton, a man who wields considerable power in Parliament. But the Crinoline Academy is not simply a school. Its principal assumes that her graduates will pay for their education by performing secret missions at her command. And Effie’s mission is to destroy Lord Compton.

Joanna Miller, The Eights (G.P. Putnam, April 2025)

Joanna Miller’s debut novel follows four women attending the University of Oxford in 1920. They are not the first female university students in the United Kingdom, or even the first who can hope to attain a degree, but they are the first class of women who can, if they fulfill all the requirements, attain a university degree from Oxford.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, not everyone on the campus regards their presence as a plus. Views of women as lightheaded, emotionally unstable creatures incapable of mastering sophisticated thought or living without male guidance have begun to fade since the Great War of 1914–1918, but they continue to influence popular thinking. Unlike the men, women students live under strict restrictions against partying or even entertaining male visitors who are not blood relatives. Defy the rules, and they risk being “sent down” (suspended, in effect) or even dismissed from the program altogether.

So what brings the four heroines to Oxford? Each has her own story, and learning what it is, who they really are, and what draws them together drives this novel.

I’ll be talking with Joanna Miller about The Eights on the New Books Network in May 2025.

Kathleen Williams Renk, No Coward Soul Have I (Bedazzled Ink, 2024).

I first encountered Kathleen Renk in connection with her first novel, Vindicated, which followed the life of Mary Godwin Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, from her early encounters with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley through their elopement and eventual marriage and into Mary’s later years. You can find out more about that and a link to a New Books Network interview from this 2021 post on my old blog.

In No Coward Soul Have I, Renk takes a step back in time, re-imagining Percy Shelley’s adventures in Ireland with his then-wife Harriet. Shelley was a radical and an atheist, but ultimately more comfortable with discussing change in a drawing room than winning it on the battlefield. Their adventures, which include invented meetings and a quest by Harriet to rescue two poor Irish children from the Foundling Hospital, are contrasted with a self-related tale by the real-life Anne Devlin, housekeeper to Robert Emmet, who was in turn executed for leading a rebellion against British rule of Ireland in 1803.

Although I would have liked to see Anne Devlin’s story become the center of its own book, this novel does a good job of humanizing Harriet Shelley, who has too often been ignored or deprecated in comparison with the better-known Mary Godwin. Here Harriet emerges as a sympathetic figure, in some ways more competent than her famous husband. And that is an achievement worth celebrating.

Karen Swan, The Midnight Secret (Pan Macmillan, April 2025).

Fourth and last in Karen Swan’s Wild Isle series, The Midnight Secret begins on the Outer Hebrides island of St. Kilda’s in 1926, with the perspective of Jayne Ferguson, the wife of a handsome but, she soon learns, abusive man. It then jumps forward to 1930, the year when the population of St. Kilda’s evacuated the archipelago for good. This event anchors all four books in the series, and the latest installment updates not only Jayne’s story but those of the three previous heroines: Effie, Mhairi, and Flora.

From her mother, Jayne has inherited a particular form of second sight that shows her the faces of people in her vicinity who are destined to die soon. The visions haunt her until the death occurs, but they do not come with useful information about what will cause it or how to prevent it. Sometimes even the “who” remains murky at first. The combination of this rather disturbing gift and what Jayne sees as the necessity to conceal her husband’s abuse erect a barrier between her and those around her, especially after the transition to the unfamiliar landscape of the Scottish mainland.

At the same time, Effie, Mhairi, and Flora are wrestling with the consequences of their own prior choices as well as the difficulties of adapting to a completely unfamiliar world. And as things heat up, with various characters accused of involvement in the mysterious death, Jayne’s extrasensory ability becomes ever more important to the survival of her community even as it undermines her already rocky relationship with her spouse.

I have plans to talk with Karen Swan about the series on the New Books Network in June 2025. You can also find our 2023 Q&A, focused on her contemporary Christmas novels, here on the blog.