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.

When the Lights Came On: Cinema, Class, and the Stories We Cling To, a guest post by RJ Verity

Welcome to author RJ Verity, who's here today with a post about the role of the cinema in early 20th-century society: the background to her debut historical novel.

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When the Lights Came On: Cinema, Class,
and the Stories We Cling To

by RJ Verity

For many working-class families in the early 20th century, the cinema wasn’t just an escape. It was the first place they saw lives larger than their own reflected back at them—the flicker of possibility projected onto a fragile strip of celluloid.

In Britain, by the 1920s nearly every industrial city and mining town had its own picture house. A visit to the cinema was a ritual, a highlight of the week. The historian A. J. P. Taylor once described interwar cinema-going as “the essential social habit of the age,” and it’s easy to see why. The bioscope halls and “electric palaces” that sprang up across the country became not just entertainment venues, but communal spaces where hopes, fears, and identities could be rehearsed in the dark.

Across the Atlantic, Americans were making similar weekly pilgrimages. In the 1900s and 1910s, nickelodeons—five-cent picture houses packed with immigrant and working-class audiences—sprang up in cities and coal towns alike. By the 1920s, they gave way to the great “movie palaces,” which promised marble foyers, chandeliers, and velvet seats. Yet crucially, ticket prices stayed low enough for miners, millworkers, and shop assistants to keep attending. Palaces blurred class lines: for a dime or two, ordinary people could step into surroundings as sumptuous as any opera house. The geography differed, but the impulse was the same—to sit together in the dark and dream.

Writers have long recognised this dual role of cinema—as both escape and mirror. Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (1921) gave audiences the bittersweet spectacle of resilience born out of poverty. Greta Garbo’s first talkie, Anna Christie (1930), was advertised with the tagline “Garbo talks!”—a reminder that cinema was forever reinventing itself, just as its audiences dreamed of doing.

Literary fiction, too, has mined the emotional charge of movie-going. Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show (1966), set in a fading Texas town, captures the poignancy of a cinema on the brink of closure, its light dimming along with the community’s prospects. Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions (2002) meditates on the mystery of a vanished silent film star and the haunting power of moving images to outlive their makers. Julian Barnes, in The Noise of Time (2016), turns to music and totalitarianism rather than film, yet wrestles with the same question: how art survives when lives are precarious.

Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933) and A. J. Cronin’s The Stars Look Down (1935) were later adapted for the screen, bringing industrial hardship and working-class lives directly into cinemas. These adaptations remind us that film was never only about fantasy—it was also about recognition.

Children in front of movie theatre, Alpine, Texas (public domain)

Virginia Woolf, in her 1926 essay The Cinema, caught something of this strange alchemy. “We are beholding a world which has gone beneath the waves,” she wrote, marvelling at how moving pictures created visions both intimate and uncanny. Woolf sensed that cinema could show truths not easily told in words: how communities fracture and endure, how individuals imagine themselves anew.

That imaginative leap is what fascinates me as a novelist. My debut historical novel, Poole of Light (September 2025), begins in 1913 with a boy from a colliery town who comes across his first picture house. For Jem, the cinema is revelation: a doorway into stories that feel both impossibly distant and tantalisingly close. Across the decades that follow—through world wars, new technologies, and his own battles with identity—the cinema offers him not just escape, but a way of piecing together who he might become.

"Where the boys spend their money" (photo of St. Louis, Missouri; public domain)

 
I don’t think Jem’s story is unique to fiction. For countless people in Britain and America, the weekly trip to the pictures was about more than amusement. It was a way of locating oneself in a rapidly changing world. Sitting in the dark, you might imagine being someone else; you might imagine your town, your family, your class differently. The silver screen shimmered with reinvention.

That’s why early cinema continues to draw me back as both writer and reader. It’s not only nostalgia for the glamour of Chaplin or Garbo, but the recognition that behind the laughter and tears sat working people from every walk of life, grasping for meaning. Stories were sustenance. And the cinema, in its golden age, was where light itself became a form of survival.

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Short Bio

RJ Verity is the author of Poole of Light, her debut historical novel set against the rise of cinema in early 20th-century England, and the first in The Poole Legacy series. Her writing explores memory, class, and the stories that shape us.

Poole of Light launches across all Amazon marketplaces on 16 September 2025, with the eBook available now for pre-order: https://mybook.to/poole-of-light

Discover more at https://www.rjverity.com.

The Gatsby Gambit takes a fun alternative history/mystery spin on Fitzgerald's classic novel

At the outset of Anderson-Wheeler’s freshly imagined debut, all the principals of The Great Gatsby are alive and well, years after their initial gathering. With their house under renovation, Daisy and Tom Buchanan are bunking at Jay Gatsby’s West Egg mansion on Long Island, along with Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker. Under her boorish husband’s nose, Daisy and Gatsby are still secretly carrying on. Their marriage in tatters, the Wilsons have moved out to New Jersey. Wait, what?

Everyone’s personalities fit the expected mold, but this is clearly an alternate history spinoff to Fitzgerald’s classic. My choice to pick up this novel soon after a Gatsby reread probably wasn’t well-timed. Once I reoriented myself, the plot became an enjoyable “what if” mystery that whipped up new scenarios for familiar characters. 

published by Viking, 2025

In this version, Greta Gatsby, Jay’s younger sibling, returns home to West Egg after graduating from finishing school, hoping for a relaxing summer, only to find her beloved home overcrowded with her wealthy brother’s socialite friends. One of the maids sees a mysterious figure lurking around, and the next morning, a body is found on Gatsby’s boat, an apparent suicide.

Considerable shock ensues, but only the victim’s mother seems upset. The police inspector considers it an open-and-shut case. Greta feels something’s amiss, and her sleuthing proves fertile. She also develops a firmer spine while interviewing servants and seeking clues in the seedy Bowery neighborhood, a place no properly raised young lady should go. 

For readers who adore Fitzgerald’s subtle style, a novel where Daisy explains her feelings may be too much. If you can set aside the comparisons and the occasional off-note Britishisms, you may appreciate this cheeky homage as a fun Jazz Age escape with a pointed look at wealth and class advantages.

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The Gatsby Gambit was published by Viking in April in the US and Canada; Renegade Books is the UK publisher.  I reviewed it originally for the Historical Novel Society.

I'd reread The Great Gatsby over the summer, after seeing countless articles about the book's centenary. Then I got an email about the "author's edition" being on Kindle sale.  First time I'd read it in full since 9th-grade English class, and I dare say I didn't appreciate the high quality of the writing back then.

The novel's been in the public domain since 2021, and there are several other recent sequels, spinoffs, and reimaginings appearing this year.  The Great Mann by Kyra Davis Lurie (Crown, June) is a Gatsby retelling amidst the Black elite in postwar L.A., and Allyson Reedy's Mrs. Wilson's Affair (Union Square, Oct.) switches the viewpoint to Tom Buchanan's mistress. For more in this vein, Goodreads has a list of retellings, sequels, and prequels, and I just added the three abovementioned books to it.  Finally, I didn't realize this until after I'd finished the book, but "Greta" is a clever anagram.

On Isabella Street takes a Canadian perspective on the social turmoil of the late '60s and the Vietnam War

In May 1967, Toronto pulses with activity fueled by the counterculture movement, and Sassy Rankin soaks it up while attending the massive love-in at Queen’s Park. A talented singer with natural confidence, Sassy hasn’t fully squared her love for the hippie life with her father’s status as a successful realtor (who pays for her apartment) and her brother Joey’s unfathomable decision to “fight another country’s war” alongside U.S. Marines in Vietnam.

Dr. Marion Hart, a psychiatrist at the Ontario Hospital, observes the streetside excitement from a safe distance. She worries about her patients’ fate, foreseeing they’ll become homeless or violent after they’re released into the community as deinstitutionalization policies take effect. Over time, she comes to care especially for one of them, Daniel Neumann, puzzled why a man haunted by his Vietnam memories could long to rejoin his fellow soldiers “in country.”

Sassy and Marion live in the same building at 105 Isabella Street and aren’t much alike, but through in-depth conversations, they become close as sisters. On Isabella Street is a warm, authentic portrait of their unusual friendship, and so much more.

In this well-paced novel, Graham handles an array of social issues with exceptional clarity and appropriate depth: workplace sexism, family expectations, the presence of American war resisters, urban gentrification, and how returning Vietnam veterans test the city’s emotional fabric. She creates realistic links between the Greatest Generation and their children, showing how WWII’s effects still linger.

Through Daniel, Marion comes to understand the concept of wartime brotherhood while her admiration for him increases, while Sassy, carefree yet immature, learns responsibility and finds new application for her people skills.

Despite occasionally overused slang, the story carefully balances its nostalgic period vibe with the raw truth about war. As the plot takes unforeseen turns, the characters surprise both the reader and themselves with their growth and resilience.

On Isabella Street was published by Simon & Schuster in Canada and the US in April. This review was written originally for the Historical Novel Society.  This is the first novel of Genevieve Graham's that I've read, and I'm looking forward to reading others.  Most of her novels (this is the 13th) focus on various aspects of Canadian history. The publisher recommends it to fans of Kristin Hannah's The Women, and I agree.