Interview with historical novelist Elisabeth Storrs about her latest book, Fables & Lies

With her new novel, Elisabeth Storrs moves from her familiar ground of long-ago Rome and Etruria, setting for her Tales of Ancient Rome trilogy, to WWII Germany—and her enthusiasm for the archaeology of the ancient world is carried forward here. Fables & Lies (The Book Guild, Apr. 28, 2026) centers on a woman from an ordinary German family, Freyja Bremer, who takes part in efforts to save invaluable museum artifacts housed in Berlin: a plotline based on a true story. Even more gripping is the deep dive into Freyja’s viewpoint as she gradually penetrates the fog of propaganda instilled into Germans for years by the cruel Nazi regime and awakens to a new and courageous purpose, one that involves considerable risk.

Emotionally involving and morally complex, Fables & Lies doesn’t hold back on its realistic view of the period, including Freyja’s family members’ individual stances toward the Nazis. It also demonstrates how deeply the regime infiltrated the archaeological field in an attempt to distort the historical record toward their racial ideology. I haven’t read another WWII novel like it. My thanks to Elisabeth for answering my questions in such depth!

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What inspired you to write about the ancient artifacts known as Priam’s Treasure, specifically during the WWII years?

I am a great lover of the ancient world. In my reading, I came across the story of the archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, who not only proved Troy existed but also discovered a fabulous cache of gold there known as Priam’s Treasure.

Sophia Schliemann, wife of Heinrich Schliemann, wearing “Helen’s jewels”

During WW2, the treasure was kept in the Pre and Early History Museum situated next door to Gestapo Headquarters and SS House in Berlin. I was intrigued with the journey of this priceless trove which was smuggled out of Turkey then “bequeathed” to the German people by Schliemann. Now it is held by the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Its ownership remains hotly debated by all three countries.

When researching the Trojan gold, I discovered the little-known story of German museum curators who protected their nation’s (and the world’s) treasures from constant aerial bombardment. As such, I wanted to tell their tale, which contrasts with the Nazis plundering both private and public collections across Europe.

Priam’s Treasure, in the Pushkin Museum

There are many WWII novels out there, yet I haven’t read a story like this one, one that spans from the beginning of WWII to the fall of Berlin, seen from the viewpoint of a German woman. Can you reveal more about your writing process: how you worked to create this intimately detailed storyline across the length of the war?

The book is very much about the experience of ‘ordinary’ Berliners rather than battles and acts of great heroism. Instead, I show courage can be found in the smallest acts of defiance. My protagonist, Freyja Bremer, is a museum assistant who works for Direktor Wilhelm Unverzagt. However, Unverzagt is also a Nazi and an archeologist for Himmler’s SS Ahnenerbe Ancestral Heritage Research Institute. As such, the novel has two major plotlines: the mission of the German museum curators; and the work of the SS Ahnenerbe to promulgate the “Aryan Myth” and conduct racial studies to justify conquest, dispossession and murder.

Sustaining a narrative spanning nearly six years was difficult but necessary if I was to convincingly combine the two plots. The spine of the novel follows Freyja’s love affair with Darien Lessing, an archaeologist who shows her the rot beneath the Regime’s lies as they strive to protect the museum’s collections. Intertwined is Freyja’s forced marriage to Kaspar Voigt, one of the Ahnenerbe’s racial studies scholars, and her quest to discover what her husband’s research entails.

To structure the novel, I identified various highpoints in the history of the safekeeping work and the Ahnenerbe’s activities to act as anchors in the narrative. I then placed these against major events in Berlin such as the RAF’s saturation bombing, American daylight raids, and the Soviet advance on the city and its collapse. The broader events of the war stay in the background with news of key invasions filtering through via rumors or Goebbels' propaganda.

When we first meet Freyja, she’s 21, working in Berlin’s Pre and Early History Museum in 1939, and she’s been inculcated in Nazi propaganda, including the pseudoscience related to Aryan race myths. It’s clear, though, that she has her own mind, and her conversations with Darien have her questioning so many things she’s been taught. How do you strike a balance between creating a sympathetic character and giving her a realistic perspective for a young woman living in this place and time?

Good question! It was a huge challenge to write the book from the perspective of a “child of the Reich” who goes on a journey to enlightenment. Hitler understood the importance of indoctrinating children. The education system was immediately attacked in 1933 with only Nazi teachers employed. The curriculum was limited, with physical fitness a priority. Girls were destined to be wives and mothers, boys to be soldiers. Between the age of 10-18, boys and girls were also required to attend programs run by the Hitler Youth or the League of German Maidens. Nazis worked hard to alienate children from parents who may have harbored anti-fascist sentiment, actively encouraging them to inform on them.

There was a seductive element to teaching children they were superior due to the “Aryan Myth” which asserted they were part of the “Master Race” who were “bearers of culture” compared to “sub-humans” who “destroyed culture,” i.e., Romani, Slavs, People of Colour and, most particularly, Jews.

Knowing this, I could not ignore Freyja’s indoctrination as many novels do when depicting “good” German protagonists. However, there are ameliorating factors in Freyja’s life that allows her to listen to the heretical views of an outsider like Darien Lessing. At 21, she represents a cohort that was exposed to liberal education before falling under the domination of Nazi dogma in their impressionable teens. Freyja also has the benefit of living with her father who acts as a moral compass due to his Christian beliefs. She shows integrity in remaining silent about her father’s resistance activities, and subsequently allows herself to be trapped in marriage to an SS scholar in order to protect him. In doing so, I hopefully show early on Freyja is innately caring and unwilling to betray those whom she loves.

Nevertheless, to reveal the operations of the SS Ahnenerbe, I was faced with the ethical dilemma of first marrying the brainwashed Freyja to the ethnologist, Kaspar Voigt, who sees her as the ideal Aryan wife. I saw it as the only credible plot device to reveal his despicable actions. It was disturbing to write the earlier scenes where Freyja is enthralled by Kaspar, who is a famous explorer when they first meet. I knew I was spouting dangerous rhetoric but, in doing so, I also reveal how persuasive esoteric Nazi beliefs were to those cocooned within its realm. As Primo Levi said: ‘When understanding is impossible, knowing is necessary.’

When I first encountered him in the novel, I hadn’t realized Wilhelm Unverzagt, director of the museum where Freyja works, was a historical figure. He certainly left a divided and controversial legacy, as is initially hinted when he advises Darien to move his academic focus to “a Germanic perspective of prehistory” for better career opportunities. You’ve brought considerable complexity to his portrayal. How did you develop your interpretation of him?

I struggled greatly in understanding the true nature of Wilhelm Unverzagt. Was he a true believer or simply a pragmatic opportunist who was prepared to make a deal with the devil? He certainly showed physical courage when protecting his beloved museum. I read many German journal articles about his life to glean insight into his character. And I was lucky enough to gain access to his day journals from 1944-46, together with some personal correspondence and a detailed account written by his wife post war.

Unverzagt was an example of one of the many classical historians “Römlinge” who made a Faustian Bargain to advance their careers by switching their focus to German prehistory. Wounded in WWI, he was clearly embittered by Germany ceding Polish territory. In the early 1930s, he was persecuted by an academic rival who leveled accusations that Unverzagt was part Jewish resulting in the loss of his professorship. In response, he sought the protection of the SS Ahnenerbe and the patronage of both Himmler and Göring.

Unverzagt was in no way involved in the more heinous activities of the Ahnenerbe’s racial studies program. However, despite his considerable international reputation, he was prepared to twist history to serve power by propagating the theory the first Indo-Europeans i.e. “Indo-Aryans” originated in Scandinavia and spread civilization throughout Europe. This underpinned Nazi propaganda the Master Race was entitled to reclaim “ancestral lands” lost through the Treaty of Versailles. In the end, I concluded he was a charismatic, amoral chameleon who managed to succeed under whichever regime he lived. He died lauded for his work reconstituting the Pre and Early History Museum in East Berlin, which included exhibits looted and then returned by Russia – but, alas, not Priam’s Treasure.

I hadn’t been familiar beforehand with the astonishing history of Berlin’s Jewish Hospital, and the heroism of both halves of interfaith couples during the war. How did you decide to include these details within the novel?

The Jewish Hospital certainly was a hidden gem which I chanced upon in researching the history of Berlin’s Jews. There was a brief mention in one text about Jewish doctors working there who were married to Gentile “Aryan” women thereby giving them “privileged” status which provided a limited degree of protection. The hospital became the only place that provided medical treatment to Jews, perversely healing them before sending them to the camps. Ultimately, it became the last transit camp in Berlin and then a refuge in the final Soviet assault. Finding reference to the hospital was a moment of serendipity as it provided the inspiration for a sub-plot exploring the persecution of “mixed race” couples. The hospital doctors faced terrible ethical choices under threat of deportation. And the pressure placed on their Gentile wives to divorce them thereby condemning their husbands to certain death was sustained and cruel. To tell their stories I created the characters of Darien’s sister, Parisa, who is married to Dr Leon Epstein. Freyja’s encounter with the couple opens her eyes to the true plight of the Jews and leads her to resistance.

What were some useful or especially interesting discoveries you made during your research in Germany?

“Walking the ground” upon which an historical novel is set is invaluable. I retained an expert guide who escorted me on an extensive personalised walking tour of Berlin over two days. This included the eerie experience of donning a hardhat and head torch to enter the pitch-black interior of the ruins of the Humboldthain Flak Tower, the only remaining example of three such “Flakturm” built during the war. These fortresses boasted three-meter-thick concrete walls and housed thousands of people during air raids. They also had huge cannons on their rooves to bring down enemy aircraft. The exhibits from various museums were stored in the tower erected near the Zoo. The tour (run by a speleology society) certainly gave me a taste of what it would have been like to shelter in one of these goliaths as Freyja did during the Soviet siege.

author Elisabeth Storrs

As you shared in your author’s note, the manuscript that became Fables & Lies had a very long gestation period. What kept you going, and what continued leading you back to it?

Ask my husband and he’ll tell you I am very persistent! I love escaping into both research and my imagination. The genesis for Fables & Lies was a contemporary novel I finished in 1994 after becoming fascinated with Schliemann’s life. At that time mystery shrouded the disappearance of Priam’s Treasure after the Soviets insisted it was lost in transit in the chaotic aftermath of the war. Various theories were postulated as to its whereabouts or destruction – including my rather improbable plot of locating it in suburban Sydney. Imagine my dismay (and delight) when I read in the newspaper the Russians admitted they’d hidden the treasure for nearly 50 years. My mystery became redundant and the manuscript was relegated to the bottom drawer.

Over the next ten or so years, I became obsessed with the Etruscans, which led to writing the three books in the A Tale of Ancient Rome trilogy. When those novels were finished, I was drawn yet again to Priam’s Treasure. How had it come to be in the Pushkin Museum? Why had the Russians lied about possessing it? I dusted off the manuscript to rewrite it as an historical novel covering the true story of the Trojan gold during WW2.

Researching a novel 30 years ago was a vastly different experience than now. Previously, I’d been limited to books in my local library. Now I had access via the internet to numerous German sources. Historians included the Axis viewpoint rather than presenting the war purely from the Western Allies’ perspective. I planned a simple plot featuring two female protagonists – a German woman (Freyja) striving to protect the treasure, and a Soviet Trophy Brigade Major whose mission was to steal it. However, when I learned about the SS Ahnenerbe, I was drawn to tell a more complex story exploring Himmler’s Master Plan. But I’m currently writing The Pinocchio Door which will finally reveal the Soviet side of the tale!

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Elisabeth Storrs has a great love for history and myths. She is the award-winning author of A Tale of Ancient Rome trilogy which was endorsed by Ursula Le Guin, Kate Quinn and Ben Kane. Now her obsession lies with Trojan treasure and twisted Germanic prehistory in her new release, Fables & Lies: A World War II Novel. Elisabeth is also the founder of the Historical Novel Society Australasia and the $155,000 ARA Historical Novel Prize. She lives in Sydney with her husband in a house surrounded by jacarandas.

Connect with Elisabeth through her website or Triclinium blog. You can find her on Facebook, Instagram, Goodreads, Amazon, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Bookbub. Subscribe to her newsletter for monthly inspirational interviews.

Bits and pieces of historical fiction news

Writing frequent pieces about books, brief reviews included, involves a lot of multitasking. At any given time, I’m typically reading one novel for review, finalizing the content for another before turning it in by the deadline, and serving as the editor for others’ reviews. Within the last few weeks, in addition to finishing up three reviews myself, I’ve been developing questions and working on intros for two upcoming author Q&As.

On top of that, I completed my service as a 2nd round judge for the Historical Novel Society’s 2026 First Chapters competition, which covered scoring and providing constructive feedback for fifteen entries, and wrapped up editorial work on the May issue of Historical Novels Review (plus my full-time librarian job). It has been an interesting but dizzying experience, shifting among multiple assignments within a short period of time. I have two more reviews to do by the end of April, so I’m not quite done yet with this reading marathon.

In other news:

My starred review of Maggie O’Farrell’s Land (Knopf, June) is out in Booklist’s April issue. I enjoyed her Hamnet and loved The Marriage Portrait, yet Land is even better. Opening on an isolated peninsula in western Ireland in 1865, and focusing on one family’s endurance of the tragic legacy of the Great Hunger and their deeply engrained, quasi-mystical relationship with their homeland, it feels like the novel she was born to write, and one only she could have written. One of her main characters is based on an ancestor who created maps for Britain’s Ordnance Survey in Ireland.

 

The Walter Scott Prize shortlist for 2026 has been announced, with five historical novels in contention for the £25,000 prize:

The Pretender by Jo Harkin (Bloomsbury, UK/Knopf, US) - a pretender to the English throne during the Wars of the Roses
The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly (Bloomsbury UK/US) - a nonspeaking young woman with autism in 1930s Vienna
Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet (Polygon, UK; Biblioasis, Can/US) - the aftermath of murders in remote 19th-century Scotland
Once the Deed Is Done by Rachel Seiffert (Virago, UK; no US edition) - secrets pervade a refugee camp in 1945 northern Germany
Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (Viking, UK; Scribner, US) - an unusual guest arrives in coastal northern England in the early ‘60s

All five are written by British authors, and the winner will be announced on June 12. This is a prestigious and well-funded prize. I haven’t read any of the five yet. In the past, I’ve had mixed luck with reading the winners and finalists; some I found superb (Hilary Mantel), while others felt too self-consciously literary for me.

I read Colin Mustful’s (publisher, History Through Fiction) Substack about the cost of running a historical fiction conference with interest. The first HTF conference, which was promoted as a small, intimate event, recently took place in Beverly, Massachusetts, and virtually. As the volunteer who handled finances and registration for the first four Historical Novel Society North American conferences (2005-11), I recognize many of the sentiments expressed in the post: a lot of hope that “if you build it, they will come!” plus a big initial learning curve, significant coordination and planning, and a diverse set of expenses. I’ve read many positive reports from attendees.

The New York Times has a feature article on Titanic fiction (gift link) by novelist Donna Jones Alward, whose latest, Ship of Dreams, fits the category. I remember a mini-trend of Titanic novels appearing in 2012, alongside the 100th anniversary of the ship’s sinking, and the subject continues to grab readers’ attention. Among the ones on her list, I’ve read The Titanic Survivors’ Book Club, about a quirky mélange of individuals in pre-WWI Paris who have the distinction and good luck to have missed boarding the fatal voyage, and can recommend it.

And also from the NYT, an interview with Nelio Biedermann (gift link), whose debut novel Lázár (Summit/S&S, 2026) is a saga about an aristocratic Hungarian family. The author is a 22-year-old Swiss undergraduate student, and I hope to read the book in due course.

A woman's adventures in Gold Rush California: Mary Smathers' Unfamiliar Territory

Reinvention is the name of the game in Smathers’ fabulous epic of Gold Rush California, which sees her heroine, Juanita Castro de la Cruz, forced to reboot her life repeatedly while her forebears’ homeland changes before her eyes.

It’s 1850, and Juanita, proud daughter of a family of Californios (Hispanic settlers), flees the Monterey rancho previously owned by generations of Castros. Deciding she can no longer act as manager for her former lover, the yanqui who bought her late parents’ holdings, she heads on horseback toward her married sister’s home. Juanita’s goal: locate her teenage son, Joaquin, who she’d sent away before his resemblance to his Irish father became obvious to his father’s wife.

Her sister and brother-in-law are troubled. With the recent US invasion of California, they need to prove ownership of their land. They think she’s crazy for seeking Joaquin in the goldfields, so after translating some legal documents, Juanita steals her sister’s old dresses and silverware to sell and travels through a multicultural land whose future feels unsettled. “We were no longer Mexico, nor Spain,” she cogently explains later, “and that, in itself, was a terrifying mystery.”

Juanita’s inner strength seems designed for adventure, something this impeccably paced novel offers in plenty. From driving a mule train into the muddy chaos of mining towns to running a Sonoma boardinghouse, through mishaps and terrible danger, Juanita picks herself up again and again while accumulating a motley assortment of friends, including a would-be high-society San Francisco madam.

Every time Juanita visits the city, the changes are dramatic. Will she find Joaquin? Will she ever pay her sister back? While Juanita sometimes gets derailed, she never forgets her objectives. Full of color and incident, this on-the-ground view of early California through a brave woman’s eyes is a thoroughly entertaining trip.

Unfamiliar Territory was published in 2025 by the author’s own imprint, mks publishing, and I reviewed it initially for the Historical Novel Society. While it’s described as a sequel to In This Land of Plenty (2020), it reads fine on its own. I haven’t yet read the first book, which is a multigenerational novel opening in 2018 and focusing on a modern woman learning about her ancestry, after which a saga about California’s history unfolds. I plan on getting myself a copy. Juanita is listed on the family tree of that novel’s opening pages. The author, Mary Smathers, is a California native and bilingual writer who has also written children’s picture books in English and Spanish. I enjoyed reading her profile in Canvas Rebel, speaking about her background, perspectives on writing about historic California, and approach to writing and publishing. She also has a launch interview with the Historical Novel Society that posted today.

For readers in search of other recent novels about the courageous, independent women who populated the landscapes of the American and Canadian West, I recommend scanning through the website of Women Writing the West, which also offers an annual WILLA Literary Award in the historical fiction category. Indie-published and small press novels are well represented here, as they are in the winners and finalists of the Spur Awards from Western Writers of America.

Twenty years of Reading the Past: some highlights and reflections

I started posting regularly at Reading the Past twenty years ago this week, in late March 2006. This was during the heyday of blogging. The historical fiction blogosphere was a vibrant place, with new reviews going up daily and avid discussions taking place online across the globe.

The publishing industry didn’t know what to do with book bloggers, these so-called amateur reviewers who set their own rules and didn’t answer to an outside authority. Newspapers’ book sections were being eliminated (sound familiar?), and so the groundswell of individual, enthusiastic online voices could no longer be ignored. We had several hugely popular BookBloggerCons in NYC, held just before BookExpo at the Javits Center, as well as meet-and-greet opportunities where I met reviewers and publicists I’m still in touch with today. The book blogging community is awesome.

In some circles, though, bloggers weren’t exactly seen as respectable. Even by (especially by) many literary authors with new books out.

Writer Richard Ford, famously, had strong opinions about bloggers. To quote from the NYT article linked above (“Are Book Reviewers Out of Print,” Motoko Rich, May 2, 2007):

Of course literary bloggers argue that they do provide a multiplicity of voices. But some authors distrust those voices. Mr. Ford, who has never looked at a literary blog, said he wanted the judgment and filter that he believed a newspaper book editor could provide. “Newspapers, by having institutional backing, have a responsible relationship not only to their publisher but to their readership,” Mr. Ford said, “in a way that some guy sitting in his basement in Terre Haute maybe doesn’t.”

Living here in the Midwest, on the outskirts of a small university town 45 miles west of Terre Haute, this was starting to feel personal, but these comments were more galvanizing than discouraging. Reviewing skill isn’t based around geography. Bloggers continued to write and review as we’d always done.

A corner of my bookish basement in the rural Midwest. It’s not a bad place to be.

And now, a couple decades later, as publishers continue to adjust to the myriad ways books are being discussed and discovered, individual voices have become more important than ever.

Book blogs still exist, of course, though the terminology and format have adapted to reader preferences. I remember the first time, a few years ago, I got an email from someone saying she enjoyed my historical fiction newsletter. It hadn’t occurred to me beforehand that my blog had become a newsletter, but the posts did go out over email, so a newsletter it now was. I’m happy with that.

For this major anniversary, I decided to dig through the archive and highlight 20-odd posts that felt significant or memorable in some way, or at least representative of the different types of content I’d been writing. These are in no particular order. For longtime readers of this site, some may be familiar, but hopefully recaps from these older posts will draw your attention to interesting books you haven’t read before.

In 2010, I interviewed author Sarah Dunant about her novel Sacred Hearts, historical fiction about a reluctant new arrival to a convent in 16th-century Ferrara. This was pre-Zoom. For this low-tech interview, I phoned her at her hotel room on one of her US book tours (arranged through her publicist), and I scribbled things down as fast as I could.

Years ago, I wrote up a series of posts called “Reviews of Obscure Books,” covering novels that were super rare, long-forgotten, or both. I may revive it someday. Diana Norman’s witty and profound King of the Last Days, set during the reign of England’s Henry II, is a book I wish would be brought back into print. For a time it had been reissued as an ebook, I believe, but I can’t find it anymore. Her Adelia Aguilar medieval mysteries written as Ariana Franklin, set during the same era, are easier to find.

A favorite review, from 2007, for Jude Morgan’s The Taste of Sorrow, about the Brontë sisters. Loved this book! The US title of this novel is Charlotte and Emily (poor Anne, always getting left out).

All the historical novel titles you could ever need. Are we sensing a trend in book naming conventions here? This started with All the Light We Cannot See and went absolutely crazy.

In 2013, I took part in the online historical fiction course called Plagues, Witches, and War run by professor and historical novelist Bruce Holsinger from the University of Virginia. It was on the Coursera MOOC platform. This course is still free and still running, so if you’re in search of deeper background on the genre, its history, and its practitioners, I recommend it. As one of the course assignments, we were asked to describe a primary source we’d found in an archive and write about it. I found an interesting one housed at the Library of Congress website, but deeper investigation led me down an unexpected path. Read more at A Puritan Maiden’s Diary: The Early American Primary Source That Wasn’t. The title gives away my conclusion, and the research was fascinating. I emailed the LC afterward about the supposed primary source, and they removed it from their archive.

Sharyn McCrumb’s The Devil Amongst the Lawyers, set in the Blue Ridge Mountains during the Depression, is based on a real-life court case. I enjoy reading McCrumb’s novels not only because of her beautiful settings, but because they offer plenty to talk about, even if not everything works for me. Her The Ballad of Tom Dooley, based on a traditional Appalachian folk ballad, is another such.

Reading lists covering trends and other popular topics: women in science and math, Jewish historical fiction, women and WWII, the Tudor era, and books with memorable cover designs.

Unintentional travel-by-novel. I have a habit of doing this, visiting a place and discovering afterward that I’d recently bought a novel set there. Such was the case with Chris Nickson’s The Crooked Spire, set in medieval Chesterfield, England, and with Elizabeth St.John’s The Lady of the Tower, set partly at the Lydiard Park estate in Wiltshire. In the instance of Kate Quinn’s The Rose Code, I visited Bletchley Park over a year before reading the novel, and memories of the trip definitely enhanced the reading experience.

Just because these are really good books: Lynn Cullen’s Twain’s End (about Samuel Clemens’ relationship with his secretary Isabel Lyon); Maryse Condé’s re-creation of her grandmother’s life, My Mother’s Mother; Sujata Massey’s The Widows of Malabar Hill, a mystery of 1920s Bombay (which now has many sequels); and Sally Gunning’s The Rebellion of Jane Clarke, one of the author’s winning historicals of colonial Massachusetts.

And to wrap things up, some more recommendations, all set in the agricultural regions and towns of the Midwest: Laird Hunt’s Zorrie, a woman’s ordinary yet uncommon life across 20th-century Indiana and Illinois; Laurie Loewenstein’s Unmentionables, in which a progressive female lecturer finds herself stuck in small-town Illinois in 1917; Michelle Hoover’s The Quickening, about women’s lives in the farming region of early 20th-century western Iowa; my interview with Rosslyn Elliott about Fairer than Morning, her inspirational romance set in Rushville, Ohio in the 1820s; The Island of Doves by Kelly O’Connor McNees, set on Mackinac Island (Michigan) in the 1830s; and Evergreen by Rebecca Rasmussen, who pairs her offbeat characters with a setting of the northern Minnesota backwoods in the late 1930s. If you think of this region as “flyover country,” read these novels to get a glimpse of the cultural history and fascinating stories found in smaller places.

Whether you’ve been visiting this site for twenty years or only the last twenty minutes, or something in between, thanks very much for reading.

A problem like Medea: Natalie Haynes and her new Greek myth retelling, No Friend to This House

Unless you’ve been chained to a rock off the Mediterranean coast for the past decade, you’ll likely have seen the growing cluster of new novels reinterpreting the lives of women (goddesses included!) from classical mythology. They look at the ancient tales through a female lens, allowing us into the perspectives of unfairly sidelined characters or those not granted sufficient voice by their original male authors. Andromeda, Circe, Ariadne, Aphrodite, Phaedra, Hera… they’ve all had their turn, some more than one.

The story of Medea poses a conundrum for a feminist reboot. The daughter of King Aietes of Colchis, she gave vital, magical help to Greek adventurer Jason after he and his Argonauts set sail to steal the golden fleece from her royal father. She also fell in love with Jason and wed him. Considered an barbarian foreigner after the couple moved back to Jason’s homeland, he abandoned her to pursue marriage with a princess of Corinth – after which Medea took drastic, violent revenge against him via their sons.

Medea is an infamous example of a bad mother. How do you rehabilitate that?

Enter Natalie Haynes: broadcaster, classicist, and experienced chronicler of other mythological lives via novels such as Stone Blind (2023), about the tragedy of Medusa, and A Thousand Ships, about the Trojan War’s women. No Friend to This House, a polyphonic tale like its predecessors, doesn’t so much reinvent Medea and other female figures from Euripides’ original text as much as bring them to the forefront and explore their actions and motivations. In doing so, she offers much to think about.

Haynes follows the myth’s standard outline, beginning with Jason’s sea voyage to distant Colchis, on the Black Sea. Departing from tradition, nearly all the viewpoints are female, and they switch off with each chapter. Those familiar with the source material are best equipped to follow the narrative thread through this labyrinth of stories. They all connect to Jason’s trip, not always to each other, so the uninitiated may find the telling a bit choppy – at least until Medea makes her first appearance, around halfway through.

With the men’s quest decentered, this approach allows for the discovery of interesting, previously tangential characters. Among them are the murderous women of Lemnos and the odd backstory to their crime. With deep grief and anger, a woman named Theophane shares a lament for her son, imprinting her forgotten existence (and his) on the reader’s memory:

No one speaks of the golden ram, they prefer to focus on what was important to Jason and his Argonauts: the golden fleece. Such a simple shift in emphasis, you scarcely notice a living creature becoming the remnant of a dead one. And perhaps you also don’t notice the small slip of the tongue, either? Because fleece is not the right word to use … [Jason] was on a quest to find the skin of the creature who wore it, a mythical creature, who was mine, my child, taken from me when he was still so new.

The dove sent to test the Argo’s passage between clashing rocks observes what she sees, as does the goddess who caused Medea’s terrible lovesickness for Jason. Likewise the river Phyllis, Medea’s sister Chalciope, and even the Argo herself. And many more.

As for Jason – the man Medea loves who so cruelly betrays her – he returns to Greece in valiant triumph, but as the years pass, he finds life as a former hero confusing and difficult. His ego is hungry, so he looks for people to feed it. It’s his fate to have his story seen through the female gaze in this revamped version, and the novel’s core tragedy ultimately turns on his actions.

You may be curious how Haynes handles the act that transformed Medea, in the popular mindset, from a sympathetic witch into a murderous one. No spoilers here, but the novel’s nail-biting finale fits with Haynes’s portrayal of this multifaceted and complex woman.

No Friend to This House was published by Harper (US/Canada) in March 2026, and by Mantle (UK) last September. This review is an expansion and substantial reworking of a much shorter review I’d written for Booklist which appeared in their February 1, 2026 issue.

Self-discovery in Tudor England, times two: Wendy J. Dunn's Shades of Yellow

If you love reading author’s notes in historical novels, learning about the background to writers’ research processes and the factors affecting their choices, Wendy J. Dunn’s Shades of Yellow will be an ideal choice for your TBR pile.

This uniquely constructed multi-period novel opens in 2010. Lucy Ellis is nearly done with the manuscript for her first novel, a work of biographical fiction about Amy Robsart, the heiress wife of English nobleman Robert Dudley. Amy’s shocking death and the resulting scandal – she was found with a broken neck at the bottom of a short staircase at her residence, Cumnor Place, in 1560 – put an end to his future marriage prospects with her rival for his affections, Queen Elizabeth I.

Dunn sets up interesting equivalences between her modern heroine and her 16th-century subject. Lucy is a breast cancer survivor, a disease Amy may have suffered from herself, and they were both betrayed by their husbands (Lucy’s soon-to-be-ex-husband, Ben, cheated on her with her good friend). Lucy feels these similarities give her unique insight into Amy’s mindset, though she’s self-aware enough to question how much of herself she’s putting into her depiction of Amy.

A consummate researcher dedicated to historical accuracy (in other words, she’s a writer after our own heart), Lucy insists on flying from Australia to England for a six-week trip. She knows a firsthand view of Amy’s former haunts will add color and depth to her story, and she hopes to make it easier to visualize Amy living there in her own time.

But Lucy arrives across the globe under a cloud of worry. She has a small brain tumor, meaning her cancer may have returned, and her headaches are worsening. After they learn the truth, her friends and family are distraught that Lucy’s delaying her biopsy.

Readers may find Lucy’s choice unwise at best, but she’s a determined woman. Lucy presses on with her novel regardless, perhaps sensing it may be too late if she doesn’t seize every moment to complete it. At the same time, Lucy faces memories from her own past, including that of a long-ago teenage romance, and persistent emails from her estranged husband.

The stakes are high in both accounts, as the two women strive to take control of their lives as best they're able. In recounting the parallel journeys of both Lucy and Amy, Shades of Yellow doesn’t use the story-within-a-story structure we’re most familiar with, but something more original and effective in showing how a historical novel comes to be.

The scenes involving Amy don’t always occur in chronological order but arise organically via Lucy’s writing journey and as she reads parts of her manuscript to family members, including her English grandfather, himself a writer.

We see Amy in the afterlife, speaking with her Angel, desperate for a word from her husband now that he’s also passed into the beyond. As Lucy visits Amy’s burial site, we see Amy kneeling in church, desperate and frightened, while Lucy tunes into the emotions she senses from that mental image and gains new understanding about her subject. Amy as an adolescent, during her first bloom of love with her Rob. Amy on her last day of life, sending her servants away. And in the modern strand, Lucy revises her book, pens new chapters, considers new angles, adjusts her timeline, fills in “these vast gaps of unknowing with her imagination.” 

It all gets wonderfully meta. Lucy’s grandfather questions why Amy’s guardian angel needs to be included (“So, you’re certain you want to write a more experimental historical novel?”), and Lucy ponders a suggestion from her grandfather’s literary agent, who spurs her to consider adding a witchcraft thread to attract an editor. “How on Earth do I weave these witches into my story without having to pull everything apart?” she thinks.

Walking through Tudor England on two levels, both firsthand and via the stories revealed later through its artifacts, is an affecting, multi-dimensional experience. Not all answers are forthcoming, which seems appropriate for a novel presenting the ways that people come to grips with the unknown.

Shades of Yellow was published by Other Terrain Press (Australia) in September 2025.

A passionate woman's pursuit of love and art: Orange Wine

For Inés Camargo de Scala, a young wife and mother in early 20th-century Colombia, certain things have always come easy. The youngest daughter of five in a blended family, she’s beautiful and artistically talented and has no problem attracting men.

She has more trouble maintaining relationships, like with her ordinary-looking sisters and with her romantic partners. She also runs afoul of the Catholic church, even though her path into a “sinful” life was caused by someone else. Married to a handsome guitar player who soon reveals himself as a hot-tempered slacker, Inés struggles to balance her pursuit of love with societal expectations.

Described by the author as inspired by her grandparents, Inés’s story takes place mostly in the small town of Paipa (“located in a part of Colombia that few people visit more than once”) and the capital of Bogotá, intermingled with whirlwind trips to Europe.

From the opening pages, in which Inés leaves her bed after childbirth to discover her husband, Alessandro, has run off with her sister, it feels we’ve entered an Isabel Allende-style generational saga of women’s self-actualization, complete with family ghosts and claims of second sight.

The style here, however, sets it apart. Inés’s narration is unpretentious and brisk, reading like an idiosyncratic memoir. She dwells much on her emotions, but it’s hard to feel the impact of pivotal life events when they’re skimmed over in a few paragraphs. Inés’s children get little opportunity to show personality; likewise for her unmarried sisters, who work for a living while Inés inherits the family mansion.

The sense of place is strong, creating appeal for readers who enjoy uncommon settings, but the timeframe feels indistinct. More fleshed-out situations and characterizations—and more showing instead of telling—would have lent the novel more weight. That said, it holds one’s attention well and makes eloquent points about gender-based double standards.

Orange Wine (Bindery Books, Sept. 2025) is the author's debut novel, and I'd reviewed it originally for the Historical Novel Society. The author is a native of Bogotá, Colombia and now lives in the US.

The press has a publishing model that's been gaining attention. Bindery Books, based in San Francisco, incorporates online influencers (called "tastemakers") into key roles in the acquisitions and marketing process. In addition to hosting a membership platform for bookish communities and content discovery, they've offered tastemakers with significant followings the power to create their own branded imprints, with support from the press. Their site lists 12 such imprints, and Orange Wine is published under the Mareas imprint, which has published five books so far. Alongside traditional marketing and publicity from the press (I discovered this book on NetGalley), the tastemaker promotes their books to their social media followers.  

Read more at an article from the Los Angeles Times from Feb. 18th: Malia Mendez, "This publisher enlists 'bookfluencers' to choose its titles. Is it working?"  The press aims to support underrepresented voices through this model, and unlike with many publishers, the authors aren't expected to shoulder any marketing load. I imagine many will find this a refreshing change.

Orange Wine was an agented submission to the press, as are two-thirds of all submissions, per the LA Times article. With the strong Gen Z involvement and vibe, fantasy (including historical fantasy and romantasy), SF, gothics, and contemporary fiction are well-represented in their list, mainstream historical fiction not so much, aside from this one example.  Even though aspects of this book didn't work for me, I'm interested to see what the press does next and am midway through watching a fascinating video from Marines, the tastemaker who chose Orange Wine, who speaks about her selection process and what she's learned about the industry.