“The road Vernice is walking is paved different from yours,” Annie’s grandmother tells her towards the beginning of Jones’s remarkable novel...

With her new novel, Elisabeth Storrs moves from her familiar ground of long-ago Rome and Etruria, setting for her Tales of Ancient Rome tril...

Writing frequent pieces about books, brief reviews included, involves a lot of multitasking. At any given time, I’m typically reading one no...

Reinvention is the name of the game in Smathers’ fabulous epic of Gold Rush California, which sees her heroine, Juanita Castro de la Cruz, f...

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...

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 nov...

If you love reading author’s notes in historical novels, learning about the background to writers’ research processes and the factors affect...