A woman alone: Allegra Goodman's Isola

Allegra Goodman’s newest novel shows how life as a young 16th-century noblewoman offers no guarantees. Not a life of wealth, not a prosperous marriage, not even a secure home.

For Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval, heiress to a chateau in Périgord in southwestern France, her intended future is swept away after her parents’ early deaths. She’s left dependent on the whims of her guardian, an older male relative who keeps himself at a distance.

Titled after the Italian word for “island,” glimpsed by the protagonist on an Italian map of the New World, Isola is an extraordinary tale of survival. Its plotline emerges from contradictions found in several historical fragments, including an account of the real woman written by Marguerite de Navarre, the king’s sister, in her Heptaméron. This is a literary space where historical fiction can take root and flourish, as it does in this book.

Marguerite’s guardian, maritime explorer Jean-François de La Rocque de Roberval, was named the Lieutenant General of New France (now Canada) by the king, and he made the unorthodox decision to bring his ward with him on his Atlantic crossing in the 1540s, when he intended to establish a colony and promote the spread of Catholicism. After discovering her relationship with a young man aboard ship, he marooned the couple, along with her elderly servant, on a small island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Years later, Marguerite was rescued, alone, and brought back to France. What must she have endured?

From the first few pages, the modern world dissolves, and we enter the viewpoint of Marguerite, who narrates her story from childhood on. She’s raised by her devoted nurse, Damienne, who always reminds Marguerite about the appropriate conduct for a girl of high birth. Marguerite befriends her teacher’s daughter, Claire D’Artois, whose calm gentility serves as a foil for her impulsiveness and curiosity, and they learn from one another.

We’re alongside Marguerite as she and Claire admire the feminine roles within Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies, and we feel her confusion when they’re moved to her chateau’s North Tower after a merchant family arrives as tenants. It seems Roberval, in charge of Marguerite’s finances, has mortgaged her home to cover his own losses.

A responsible guardian would arrange his ward’s respectable marriage with the son of a noble family, but this doesn’t describe Roberval. In him, Goodman creates a multifaceted and frighteningly effective villain. He is enigmatic, unpredictable, difficult to please, and ever-watchful for fault.

So unthinkable (to any rational person) is his decision to abandon Marguerite and the man she loves on a deserted island that we feel a lurch of shock when it happens, even though we know it’s coming. Here she develops skills she’d never thought of doing herself. She draws on newfound strength—and throw off the ladylike behavior that Damienne still insists on—to feed herself and stay alive through the seasons, from the brilliant autumns through the unsparing winters and back out again. Descriptions of the terrible cold and isolation are particularly visceral: “All was white, and all was emptiness.”

Isola isn’t what you’d expect from biographical fiction about a young woman of privilege in the 1500s. “If I was in danger here,” she thinks about her island, “so I had been at home. If I could not choose my dwelling place, that had been the case before.” We can feel her self-awareness grow alongside her strength, and by the time she returns to France, which is as class-conscious as it ever was, she is forever changed by her unusual taste of unrestricted freedom.

Isola was published by The Dial Press/Penguin Random House in February 2025.

A Different Kind of Three-Act Structure: Writing my Main Character as a Child, a Young Woman, and an Elderly Grandmother, an essay by Kristen Loesch

I'm glad to be featuring Kristen Loesch here today with an essay on a unique variation of the multi-period novel.  Her second work of historical fiction, The Hong Kong Widow, is out today from Allison & Busby (and from Berkley in the USA). As a gothic thriller featuring séances and a heroine who can see ghosts, it sounds ideal for this time of year.

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A Different Kind of Three-Act Structure:

Writing my Main Character as a Child, a Young Woman, and an Elderly Grandmother

by Kristen Loesch

In my second novel, The Hong Kong Widow, we meet one character, Mei, at three different periods of her life: As a child growing up in 1930s Shanghai; as a young refugee in 1950s Hong Kong; and as an elderly grandmother in modern-day America.

In each of these three timelines, she has one goal: Seven-year-old Mei in Shanghai wants to find her missing mother. Twenty-something Mei in Hong Kong is hell-bent on revenge, and enters a séance competition at a haunted house hosted by the wife of the man who once destroyed her life. Elderly Mei in America wants the truth about the final night of that long-ago séance competition to come to light.

Pub. by Allison & Busby (Oct. 2025)

The best feeling, when you’re reading a dual or multi-timeline historical novel, is when the narratives come together seamlessly. Not only do they make sense, presented as one story, but you get the feeling that actually, they couldn’t exist without one another. Ever since reading my first Kate Morton novel, I have been drawn to that kind of historical fiction: Usually one timeline is contemporary, in the POV of a present-day protagonist, and the other is historical, but I’ve increasingly seen multi-timeline novels in which all the timelines are historical, set at different points in the past. Either way, when this is done well, it’s breathtaking; when it’s done badly, the reader ends up more deeply invested in one timeline and one protagonist over the other. The writer, therefore, takes a risk by splitting up the narrative in this way, in the hopes of achieving that perfect plait, one timeline woven neatly into the next, all the way to the end. It is certainly what I hoped to achieve in my debut novel, The Porcelain Doll.

But in The Hong Kong Widow, all three timelines are written from the perspective of the same character. And although Mei is the same person across all three timelines, in many ways she’s also a very different person. (It’s almost like I was trying to make things harder on myself!)

When I first read Emma Donoghue’s Room, I was struck by the storytelling power of a young child’s perspective, and I knew that I would one day want to try it myself. Writing Mei as a child was an eye-opening experience for me as a writer. Although Little Mei is growing up in 1930s China, on the eve of the Japanese invasion, and her family life is no less tumultuous, I wanted her to have a wondrous innocence about her, and a quirky sense of humor. I wanted her to notice things that other people wouldn’t. I wanted her to be open and trusting and vulnerable, but also incredibly strong. I thought it was going to be so much more difficult than it was: As it turned out, Little Mei has such a distinctive voice, such a unique way of looking at the world, that whenever I wrote from her perspective, it felt effortless; it simply flowed. I never had to stop and wonder: What would this character be feeling right now? Or why does this character actually want this; why are they doing this? (I did, however, try to be careful with the vocabulary she used!)

Young Woman Mei was the greatest challenge.

In the 1950s, Mei is no longer quirky and innocent; she is lost and traumatized. As a character, she is in tremendous pain, and this pain clouds her judgement, her perspective, her every thought. She wants revenge, but she’s never considered what that revenge actually means, or what she might do afterwards. This timeline also contains the majority of the spooky, supernatural happenings in the novel; this is Mei at her most haunted, literally and figuratively. To reflect the fact that she’s largely forgotten who she is, I decided to write her in the third person. (Little Mei and elderly Mei are both written in the first person.) My aim was not only to show how far removed she is from her true self, because she is consumed by pain and hatred, but also to help the reader differentiate more easily between timelines!

Elderly Mei, who is a mother and a grandmother in 2015 Seattle, had to be both a combination of these two previous versions of Mei, but she also had to be more than that. In a way, elderly Mei is more like Little Mei; she knows who she is and she’s comfortable with who she is. She isn’t defined by her own pain, the way that 1950s Mei is. She’s moved on. But if anything, she’s moved on too far. She’s repressed her memories of the past. She refuses to believe that anything that is painful could be worth revisiting. She’s in denial of a large part of her own history, and has strived unsuccessfully to pretend that it doesn’t even exist. So while I wanted elderly Mei to come across as wise, and experienced, and self-aware, I also wanted her to need something, to be missing something, to have her own journey to embark upon.

I’m not sure I will ever write another novel the way I wrote The Hong Kong Widow. I’m not sure there will ever be another protagonist quite like Mei. The structural choices I made for this book presented a unique challenge, and a unique sense of accomplishment at the end. I would love to hear from any readers out there: Which version of Mei did you prefer? Which one spoke to you the most? And why do you think that was?

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Kristen Loesch holds a BA in History, as well as a Master’s degree in Slavonic Studies from the University of Cambridge. Her debut historical novel, The Porcelain Doll, was shortlisted for the Caledonia Novel Award and was a finalist for the Edgar Award. She lives in Switzerland. 

Elizabeth A. Tucker's The Pale Flesh of Wood is a mesmerizing American family saga

In the northern California hills in 1953, seven-year-old Lyla Hawkins nervously climbs her grandmother’s live oak to hang a tire swing from its heavy branches, having been encouraged—then bullied—into the task by her father, Charles, a charming and troubled WWII vet. Three years later, Charles hangs himself from the rope, leaving his family distraught, all wondering what motivated him and whether they bear any blame.

Pub. by She Writes Press (2025)

The subject matter admittedly sounds grim. But in her debut novel, a saga spanning a total of fifty years on both sides of the tragedy, Tucker creates such intimacy with her characters to make readers deeply invested in their lives. Each person becomes sympathetic and challenging, in turn, depending on whether we’re seeing them from within or from the outside.

Caroline, Lyla’s grandmother, is a tall, imposing woman unforgiving of weakness, which included her son’s decision to go AWOL overseas. Louise, Caroline’s daughter-in-law, misses her late husband desperately, and as Lyla grows up, their relationship becomes fraught. And while Charles adores his daughter, the personal demons spurring his recklessness get in the way.

Tucker is superb at writing scenes that evoke emotion. Charles’s post-Thanksgiving drive with Lyla to the coast on the mountain highway, radio blasting and wind rushing through their hair, starts out exciting but soon turns terrifying. Always aware of Caroline’s meanness, especially toward her dad, young Lyla knows she’ll be punished for stealing Caroline’s cherished porcelain doll—which provokes considerable suspense about whether she’ll be caught.

Because of the close focus on family dynamics, the narrative falters when this connection is broken. We learn about some important life events via offhand comments long after they occurred, which feels disconcerting. Despite these occasional slips, the story mesmerizes, leaving characters that remain with us long after it ends.

I originally reviewed this book from an ePub copy for the Historical Novels Review's August issue. It's been a few months since I read it, and multiple scenes still stick in my mind. Adult novels seen partly from a child's perspective don't always work for me, though this one did.  I also love the cover design.

Tamar Shapiro's Restitution delves into secrets, exile, and reunification in a family story about late 20th-century German history

For most of 1989, my husband was living in Germany, working for a private company after years of being stationed with the military there. He returned home to the US two days before the Berlin Wall came down. “I missed it by that much,” he told me, imagining the wild party that spilled through the streets. There had been obvious rumblings of political change earlier, but nobody knew exactly when it would happen.

For those whose lives it touched, November 9, 1989, has become a day of flashbulb memories, one marking the beginning of the Iron Curtain’s dismantling – a time of elation and the celebration of freedom. For the family at the center of Tamar Shapiro’s gripping debut Restitution, whose Oma and Opa (grandmother and grandfather) had fled East Germany for the West in the '50s, the date is indeed joyful, as well as devastating for more personal reasons.

The countries’ reintegration also brings complications for these people, and the novel kept me following how and why they arose.

The story is narrated by Kate Porter beginning in 2005, as she and her husband and daughter travel from central Illinois to New England to visit her brother, Martin, after fifteen years’ estrangement. In addition to the time around reunification, he recalls the childhood summers they'd spent at their grandparents’ home at the Bodensee (Lake Constance); the shock of their Opa’s death in ’73; and a visit to a lawyer in 1991 that led to the siblings’ long mutual silence. Another splintering in a family with a long history of separations and secrets.

In July 1990, with the borders reopened, the family members decide to return to Grimma, the former East German town where their late grandparents had lived. Their Opa was a natural storyteller, but none of his stories, oddly, involved their original home. Which, as they learn after they arrive, has been occupied by a middle-aged couple, Greta Schultz and her brusque husband, Klaus, for decades.

Afterward, Martin lets them know there are procedures for them to possibly reclaim their long-lost property. Should they?

About half the novel takes place in the 1970s and prior, between Kate’s memories and the recollections of her mother and aunt. The clear prose is unshowy yet thoughtfully worded. The many shifts in timeframe are handled smoothly, although there are so many that whenever I had to take a break from reading, I needed to re-orient myself by checking the year(s) at the start of each chapter. The German settings are so precise, also, that I wondered why the Porters’ Illinois home city went unnamed. (Based on landmarks familiar to me, they’re from the Champaign area.)

Fateful decisions lead to terrible secrets, and how and why they’re kept – and later revealed – says much about these characters. Kate and Martin’s sibling relationship, especially how patterns formed in childhood can be either nostalgic or vexing, feels honest and at times painfully real. Like Kate, I often found Martin irritating, but he became more understandable with greater context.

Anyone who enjoys interlocking mysteries mixed with family dynamics and history’s impact on individuals – both visible and not – will find much worth pondering. Restitution is a moving chronicle of the reverberation of choices over time, and of the importance of recognizing the past while reuniting divided countries and divided lives.

Restitution will be published next week by Regal House; I read it from a NetGalley copy.

Morgan Jerkins' Zeal is an engrossing, unpredictable story of Black love, family, and freedom

Zeal is an engrossing tale of a heartfelt love born during slavery, and how the couple’s descendants have the potential to embody their forebears’ greatest dreams—if they can get past some messy obstacles.

The novel opens on a moonlit evening in Manhattan, as Oliver Benjamin and Ardelia Gibbs celebrate their engagement with relatives and friends at an elegant party. With his parents’ blessing, Oliver gifts Ardelia a precious heirloom: a poetic, heartfelt letter dated October 1865, written by his ancestor Tirzah Ambrose to her beloved, Harrison, from whom she was separated during wartime.

Over the next 150 years, their families’ stories unfold, beginning just after the Civil War. Wearing a Union soldier’s blue uniform, Harrison returns to the plantation in Natchez, Mississippi, where they had been enslaved, only to discover the site in ruins and Tirzah nowhere to be found. Now residing in Shreveport, Louisiana, Tirzah has a kind preacher looking out for her welfare, but she never gives up hope of reuniting with Harrison.

Jerkins is a superb storyteller who nimbly uses a vast swath of American history for her canvas, from the Freedmen’s Bureaus that supported the formerly enslaved, the Black Codes that legalized discrimination, the Great Migration, and much more… leading through the isolation of the Covid pandemic. Revealing specifics of the plot risks spoilers; the novel is best experienced through the author’s own words.

Covering impressive geographic and emotional ground, she explores her strong-minded characters’ choices as they pursue romantic liaisons and the freedom to live as they wish, sometimes getting in their own way. The trauma they encounter is laid bare on the page, and the love they share echoes even more strongly. An unforgettable story of ancestral legacies and the long journey to understand and overcome them.

Zeal was published by Harper in the US, Canada, and the UK earlier this year. My review originally appeared in the Historical Novels Review.  If you're in the US, you can get a copy on Kindle for $1.99 during the month of September.  It's well worth it!

Stitching Together the Novel Research, an essay by Barbara Stark-Nemon, author of Isabela's Way

I love how Barbara Stark-Nemon's essay about historical research incorporates embroidery, both thematically and literally.  Her new novel, Isabela's Way, is published tomorrow.

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Stitching Together the Novel Research

Barbara Stark-Nemon

Anyone who knows me well has learned that I love novel research, and in the course of ten years of doing author talks and interviews, one of the most frequent questions I’m asked is how and where I conduct my book research. My new novel, Isabela’s Way, takes place in early 17th-century Portugal, Spain, France, and Germany, and required extensive research involving travel, reading and experiential learning.

Isabela, my main character, is a young embroideress in Portugal, and her embroidery becomes crucial to the novel’s plot. A dear friend gifted me with a book that grabbed my attention and informed the embroidery elements in the novel. Its title alone intrigued me —Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, by Clare Hunter. 

Hunter’s book tells the story of embroidery in Europe, and traces the development of stitchery entwined over centuries with the history of the people and places where embroidery was cultivated. It also tells of the plants that found their way into fabrics, dyes, thread and decoration starting in the 10th century. Inevitably the history of embroiderers became the history of the women who embroidered, the perfect background information I needed to move forward with Isabela’s Way.

Women used needlework to claim their place in the world, “stitching down political comment or feminist complaint, documenting their experience through domestic sewing.” During the 16th and 17th centuries, “embroidery was one of the most precious forms of …communication, valued as a transmitter of intellect and emotion - when it was a conversation between people and their God, the church and its congregation, ruler and subjects. Needlework had power and embroiderers had value.”

A writer knows when she’s found a deep source of material when every page requires notes! I was particularly interested, in Threads of Life, in the story of Mary Queen of Scots, whose complicated life between Scotland and France and her sovereignty fight with Elizabeth I of England is a colorful part of history. Mary’s son James became king of England during the time my novel takes place. Hunter tells us that Mary was an expert embroideress, an art she learned in France where embroidery had moved from monasteries to castles and into home production. For all the years that Mary was kept captive because of her threat to the English crown, she embroidered coded messages in gifts of clothing, in her own ensembles and in banners displayed in royal and public settings. These beautifully stitched items subtly reflected her demands to be freed, her devout Catholic faith, her political rivalry with Elizabeth and her romantic interests. I borrowed this concept and adapted it to Isabela’s refugee story.

Another form of research I used heavily for Isabela’s Way involved trips to museums on three continents to view early 17th-century paintings and textiles. I wanted to see what clothing and other embroidered textiles were represented, and when possible, to see the textiles themselves. I also wanted a sense of rooms in 17th-century homes, furnishings, cooking and eating implements and landscapes. I haunted the old historic parts of the European cities and countryside where my story took place, imagining Isabela stitching her way with the sights and smells of the local landscapes.

Because I like many forms of fiber art—I quilt, knit, crochet and sew—I was drawn to the study of embroidery personally, and decided to “try my hand” at it! My wonderful book cover designer incorporated embroidery-like images into the cover for Isabela’s Way and (perhaps unwisely) I determined to recreate that cover as an embroidered piece. That decision opened up a whole new world of local embroiderers, international organizations with vast stitch banks and textile history over hundreds of years.

Stitching the book cover has been a challenge, a joy, and a meditation on slow art. I newly appreciate the skill required to do embroidery well, the complexity of the design process, and the exacting patience embroiderers must embrace. I have experienced (along with occasional frustration!) the quiet thrill of bringing color and texture to an outlined design. Finally, it’s been a delightful way to deepen my understanding of my main character, Isabela!

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Barbara Stark-Nemon is the award-winning author of short stories, essays, the historical novel Even in Darkness, and the contemporary novel Hard Cider. Her historical novel Isabela’s Way is published in September 2025. Barbara lives, writes, swims, cycles, and does fiber art in Ann Arbor and Northport, MI.

Stephanie Cowell's The Man in the Stone Cottage reflects on the creative life of the Brontë sisters

Stephanie Cowell’s latest novel to explore the inner lives of artistic people from the past reveals the passions of the Brontë sisters, primarily Emily and Charlotte. These talented siblings have figured in many unique works of fiction. They all died tragically young, and the best literary interpretations grant us the wish that they might live again on the page. As this one does.

Mystery surrounds the title character. In 1846, on one of her regular walks through the moorlands of west Yorkshire, Emily meets a shepherd from the Outer Hebrides living in a stone cottage which had previously been in ruins. Affable and kind, he doesn’t much resemble Heathcliff, the brooding, mercurial hero she invents later on, though he has his own bittersweet story of loneliness and exile that has the air of a Celtic legend.

Their meetings are at first infrequent, but memorable, and Emily holds them secret. Is he real, or did she wish him into being? Years after Emily’s death, having long suspected there was a man in her sister’s life, Charlotte find traces of their relationship and seeks out the truth. The shepherd remains secondary to the main story of the sisters’ lives, but his presence is emblematic of the novel’s themes.

The characters are vividly drawn, and their emotional depth, combined with judicious choices on which scenes to depict over the novel’s nine-year span, gives this fairly short novel (260pp) considerable dimension. We follow Charlotte from her heartbreak over unrequited love through years of poverty at the Haworth parsonage, the Brontës’ beloved home, and her unexpected fame when her authorship of Jane Eyre becomes known. Emily is intensely private, a wild spirit who loves roaming outdoors, though she doesn’t neglect her domestic chores.

Their brother Branwell’s self-destruction over romantic failure and the weight of self-imposed expectations troubles Emily greatly due to their closeness. Anne Brontë describes Branwell aptly in a letter, saying of him that “he wants to step into greatness as if he opened a tower door.” With their stubborn father nearly blind from cataracts, refusing help, and in denial about their penury, Charlotte knows it’s up to her and her sisters to support their family.

The small village of Haworth and its environs are beautiful and bleak, an atmospheric character in itself, and one with great influence. “She took the dull brown of the moor in winter and the endless loneliness of the exiled and dead and blended them in ink and paper,” we learn about Emily, seeing how her characters preoccupy her mind wherever she is. Here and elsewhere in this immersive biographical novel, the creative power of the imagination continues to echo.

The Man in the Stone Cottage will be out from Regal House next week.