There are so many exciting new books due to be published in February. Here are just ten that have caught my eye.
Do any of these appeal to you?
The Secret of Snow by Tina Harnesk
Máriddja is eight-five years old and more than a little eccentric. When she finds out she has cancer, her first thought isn't for herself. It's for her beloved husband. Without children or grandchildren, Máriddja and Biera have only ever had each other. She's determined to keep her diagnosis a secret from Biera, and to find the one person who might take care of him when she's gone.
Kaj is new to the village, recently engaged to the love of his life, and mourning the death of his mother. One day, he finds a box of Sámi handicrafts that once belonged to his mother, the carefully wrapped objects placed together like a crisp new set of jigsaw pieces. If he can solve the puzzle, it will unlock a secret he could have never imagined.
Bianca's Cure by Gigi Berardi
Florence, 1563. Forbidden from practicing her herbal cures in Venice, the young noblewoman Bianca Capello flees to Florence, where the ruling Medici family practices alchemy. There, she wins herself an invitation to their palace, and, as it turns out, a path to the duke regent Francesco’s bed.
The impassioned bond between Francesco de Medici and Bianca is at the core of this fact-driven dive into medicine, politics, love, and ultimately death in Renaissance Florence. Malaria killed many of the Medicis, but traces of the poison arsenic were recently found in Francesco’s remains. Even more sinister: Bianca’s remains have never been found. To this day, what happened to Bianca and Francesco remains one of the greatest mysteries surrounding Renaissance Italy’s legendary Medicis.
Bianca’s Cure probes what might have been as Bianca’s quest for a malaria cure—in palaces, gardens, sick rooms, and whorehouses—collides with Francesco’s intensifying illness. Her main tool is the herb artemisia—medicine still used today. A woman who dared to practice science well ahead of her time, Bianca fights off self-doubt until she believes herself invincible. But is she? When only she stands between Francesco and death, her skill may save him or doom them both.
Shared Secrets of the Home Front Nurses by Rachel Brimble
1943: Becoming a Home Front nurse, meant Kathy Scott was finally able to escape the violence of her childhood. At long last, her life has taken a turn for the better. Particularly because, for the very first time, she’s made some wonderful friends–fellow nurses Sylvia, Freda and Veronica.
Kathy’s known for not being short of a word or two. So nobody’s more surprised than her when she finds herself tongue-tied around Freda’s handsome brother, James – who’s home from war with an unexplained injury.
Eventually they start to open up to each other… But can two people who have felt so broken by their experiences ever find a chance for happiness?
Eradication by Jonathan Miles
A moving fable in which a grieving man, confronts a broken world on an island overpopulated by goats.
Reeling from tragedy, a former jazz musician-turned-schoolteacher named Adi answers a job listing advertising a chance to save the world. The assignment: to spend five weeks alone on the tiny, isolated Pacific Island of Santa Flora and reckon with its invasive population of goats that's sent the ecological balance severely out of whack..
What follows, however, is anything but balanced. The threats to the once-Edenic island, Adi soon learns, aren't exactly what his employers said they were - and, complicating things further, he discovers he's not alone on the island. Fearful for his own life, and for the fate of the island, Adi spends his sun-drenched days rooting out the true threat to Santa Flora, and, by extension, to the world it occupies - and the desperate steps he must take to eradicate it.
Eradication is an utterly unforgettable reading experience and the work of a truly singular imagination.
Strange Ways to Die in the Dark Ages by Emily Bush & Carrie Ingram-Gettins
Strange Ways to Die in the Dark Ages takes an amusing yet grim dive into the bizarre, unexpected, and downright ridiculous ways people met their untimely ends in early medieval Europe.
Join us as we recount tales of battles gone awry and tell the stories of monarchs who demonstrated they might not be all that fit for the throne.
Together, we will uncover what weird and wonderful ways our ancestors attempted to cure themselves or the awful inventions created to torture and execute each other.
Tread carefully in the past, though, as you never quite know what perils are lurking.
From Viking warriors felled by cheese to kings who perished in toilet-related mishaps, this book uncovers the strange, often absurd realities of life and death in an age of superstition, blood feuds, and very questionable medical advice.
Packed with dark humour, historical oddities, and stories so strange they simply must be true, this is history as you've never read it before—deadly, disturbing, and delightfully ridiculous!
Trouble Comes to Harbour House by Fenella J. Miller
Will love or duty be her downfall?
Wivenhoe, 1940.
As war tightens its grip, the residents of Harbour House are doing their bit for King and country—keeping calm through air raids, blackouts and family issues.
When Elizabeth Roby’s glamorous young cousin Lucinda Somiton arrives from London, scandal at her heels and a broken heart in her past, she brings a spark of chaos to the quiet Essex town. Accustomed to champagne parties and bright lights, Lucinda struggles to adjust to ration books and village gossip.
But when she volunteers to aid the war effort, Lucinda begins to find a sense of purpose—and perhaps a chance to redeem her name. Yet just as she starts to build a new life, the past threatens to ca tch up with her once again. And in wartime, every choice comes at a cost…
Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War by Jane Rogoyska
A meeting place for Europe’s bohemian artists. A headquarters of the Nazi occupation. A shelter for camp survivors.
This is the story of how one Paris hotel came to hold the weight of a century.
The Hotel Lutetia is a Paris institution, the only ‘grand’ hotel on the city’s bohemian Left Bank. Ever since it opened, it has served as a meeting place for artists, musicians and politicians. André Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its rooms, Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. It has a darker history, too. During one short period, it became a focus for some of the most dramatic and terrible events in recent history.
In the 1930s the Hotel Lutetia attracted intellectuals and political activists, forced to flee their homes when Hitler came to power, who met here with the hope of forming an alternative government. But when war came, Paris was occupied, and the hotel became the headquarters of the German military intelligence service – and the centre of their operation to root out enemies of the Reich. In 1945, the Lutetia was requisitioned once more, this time transformed into a reception centre for deportees returning from concentration camps.
Hotel Exile is about what happens on the edges of a war. At its heart are three groups of people connected to a place, to one another, and to the dark ideology which dictates the course of their lives. A masterpiece of empathy and concision, Jane Rogoyska’s extraordinary new book offers us a vision of individual human beings desperately trying to find a path through some of the twentieth century’s most devastating events.
The Lister Sisters by Rebecca Batley
When Anne Lister, ‘Gentleman Jack,’ and her infamous diaries hit the headlines a few years ago, their popularity spawned a plethora of Gentleman Jack blogs, research and books which have focused primarily on Anne Lister’s romantic relationships with (a huge) number of women, but whilst they are an integral part of the Lister story, there is another woman lurking in the pages of her diaries: The original Lister Sister, Marian.
Marian Lister was Anne’s younger sister and the two women had a complex and fascinating relationship.
The evidence reveals Marian to be a complicated woman who both resented, loved and was fiercely protective of her older sister.
Forced to live together for a large part of their lives Anne vehemently disapproved of Marian’s desire to escape in order to marry a “carpet maker” feeling him to be unworthy of the sister she herself derided.
Marian, for her part, did not understand her elder sister's relationships with women, but she accepted them, defended her and worried about her excessively even whilst she ranted about Anne’s spending, scheming and selfishness.
When together, the two women bickered constantly with Marian, literally at times screaming in frustration at her headstrong sister.
Anne, for her part, complained that Marian was “simple … good for nothing,” yet her approval meant a good deal to her.
Here, for the first time, we look at the complex relationship between the two women, how it developed, its moments of triumph and tragedy, as well as the profound influence it had on each of their lives.
The House of Secrets and Lies by Rosie Clarke
The compelling first instalment in the Crawley Family Saga series, a family brimming with secrets from bestselling author Rosie Clarke. Perfect for fans of Lizzie Lane and Fenella J. Miller.
One girl's chance of a new life, or a sacrifice too far?
Cambridgeshire, November 1945
Young Betty Cantrel is just 14-years-old when she reluctantly leaves her troubled family home to take up a position as companion to Frances Crawley, the ailing daughter of Eben and Mary Crawley.
As Betty begins her new life at the grand and imposing The Willows, she becomes drawn to Nathan Crawley, the handsome, yet mysterious nephew and ward of Eben Crawley whom malicious whispers linger – whispers of a tragedy that claimed the Crawley’s’ young son Edward, years before.
As her friendship grows with Frances, Betty accompanies her to London, where she glimpses another world – a world full of art, music, and freedom, and she begins to dream of a different kind of life.
But her growing loyalty to both Mary and Frances comes at a cost when tragedy forces her to choose where her true allegiance lies: with the family who opened her eyes to endless possibilities, or the one she left behind, where her dreams could become nothing but a memory.
For young Betty Cantrel, her story is only just beginning…
Previously published in paperback as Lovers and Sinners by Linda Sole.
The Resistance Knitting Club by Jenny O'Brien
Inspired by the true story of a woman who used knitting patterns to encode intelligence during World War Two.
Guernsey, 2010. After a stroke, an elderly woman shocks her family by speaking perfect French – a language they never knew she possessed. As her granddaughter unravels seventy years of silence, a hidden wartime story emerges...
Paris, 1941. After her brother is declared missing in action at Dunkirk, eighteen-year-old Lenny Gallienne vanishes into Churchill’s secret army. In a bookshop on Rue de la Pompe, she poses as a simple shop girl while encoding intelligence from Nazi headquarters into knitting patterns. Each sweater smuggled to prisoners contains flight paths. Each scarf holds radio frequencies. Each mistake means execution.
Fellow agent, Harry Dennison, is the only person who knows her real name. But when the Gestapo close in, Lenny faces an impossible choice in the Metro tunnels beneath Paris – one that will haunt her family for generations. Because in the resistance, the most dangerous secrets are the ones you keep from those you love most.
(header photo courtesy of Tom Hermans)
(all opinions are my own)
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