On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers is the novel upon which the latest Pirates of the Caribbean film is based. Originally published in 2006, it has recently been re-released in paperback and Kindle format to coincide with the film’s release. As a fan of the movie series, when I happened upon Powers’ novel available for pre-order at a bargain price in the recent Kindle sale, I decided to give it a go.

Set in the 1700s, the main character is John Chandagnac, who is travelling from England to the Caribbean to track down his uncle, who conned his way into inheriting Chandagnac’s grandfathers whole estate, by claiming his brother, Chandagnac’s father, was dead. Aboard the ship, Chandagnac meets the lovely Beth Hurwood, but their friendship is interrupted by pirates – who force Chandagnac to join them or die.

Tim Powers

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The Crimson Petal and the White is a Victorian blockbuster for the modern world. I read it shortly after it was originally published, but have returned to it because of the current BBC television adaptation which I have been watching with interest. I have enjoyed the adaptation, but it does not come close to capturing the richness and complexity of the novel.

It is a huge volume, taking the form and preoccupations of a Victorian blockbuster, but with a modern perspective and use of language. In particular, there is a frank treatment of the sexual content – the subtext for many a Victorian novelist but never addressed directly.

Michel Faber

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“We owe our state of government to it, but most of us have little idea who fought whom or why. Nor do most of us care…yet it made us the country we are, the people we are” – Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History

The English civil war was the beginning of the modern age in Britain. While everybody knows that a King was executed and battles fought between Roundheads and Cavaliers, most people are unaware that, proportionally, more of England’s population was killed in this conflict than in either the First or Second World Wars. It had a huge impact on the country we know today. Yet, despite this, it seems to be an unfashionable era to portray in fiction, and I have come across relatively few novels set at this time. This made me all the more eager to read Peter Ransley’s new novel, Plague Child, the first in a new trilogy set during this tumultuous period.

Peter Ransley

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The Paris Wife is an intriguing look at the life of a literary legend from a different perspective, a novel in which Ernest Hemingway’s first wife tells us her version of their marriage, and their life in 1920s Paris, including encounters with other American expat writers.

I was attracted to this novel by hearing an abridged serialisation on the radio – the confiding intimacy of the first person narrative worked really well in this form, as does the selection of dramatic incidents and turning points in their relationship.

This novel worked well as a piece of storytelling – it must be 3 times the length of Hemingway’s own account of that period of his life in A Moveable Feast, a memoir in the form of a series of vignettes. McLain acknowledges that she drew on the memoir, which I read afterwards for comparison, and I did recognise a lot of the events Hadley describes.

Paula McLain

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For millions of fans around the world, Jean M. Auel’s Earths Children series is unmatchable for story or quality. When it was announced that this series would be drawing to a close with the publication of the sixth and final novel, The Land of Painted Caves, in March 2011, her fans felt a mixture of sadness and anticipation. What would become of the characters they had grown to know and love since the publication of the first novel, The Clan of the Cave Bear, in 1980?

In The Clan of the Cave Bear, we met and grew to love Ayla, a young Cro-Magnon girl living during the last ice age, who was adopted by the Clan, Neanderthals.

Jean M. Auel

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Chanakya’s Chant follows very definitely in the footsteps of The Da Vinci Code and other historical thrillers. Ashwin Sanghi brackets past and present to create his page turner, throwing in an ancient chant as a leitmotif. It’s amazing that no one thought of using India’s Machiavelli as the subject or partial subject of novel before, but Chanakya with his king making strategies and devious mapping of power works as the main character of a conspiracy thriller – which is a form that has not really been explored by Indian writers of English.

This is Ashwin Sanghi’s second novel in the genre – the first The Rozabal Line was self published in America under the pen name Shawn Haigins and then published in India by Westland in Sanghi’s own name, where it promptly caught on.

Ashwin Sanghi

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I did not want to read The Red Tent. In the blurb on the back I was informed that the book was about a girl called Dinah who is a character from a bible story. As an atheist, I had no desire to read about some bible character. Yet I did read The Red Tent – it was for my reading group, and the knowledge that the whole point of the group is to read things we might not otherwise try, in order to broaden our reading experience, overcame my dislike.

Anita Diamant has taken the character of Dinah, daughter of Jacob whose many sons include Joseph (here’s a bible character I know of, thanks to the all singing all dancing version of his story), and created a story for her.

Anita Diamant

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“He’s not an obviously sympathetic candidate. All people know is that his name is synonymous with pillage and destruction. And he had few redeeming qualities. He wasn’t even nice to his dogs. But in terms of achievement, he is the greatest rags-to-riches story of all time. He started with nothing. He was abandoned and left to die. So to achieve what he did, it struck me, was pretty impressive.”

So writes author Conn Iggulden about his bestselling Conqueror series. The person in question is Genghis Khan – I can only imagine what a hard sell that must have been to his publishers! The first three books in the series (Wolf of the Plains, Lords of the Bow and Bones of the Hills respectively) tell the tale of Genghis’ life; his rise from being an outcast to becoming the first person to unite the warring tribes of the central Asian steppes, and then his founding of the Mongol nation out of what had previously been disparate groups of sheep herding nomads.

Conn Iggulden

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My grandfather used to ask me why it was that I liked to travel so much. “I went abroad once”, he’d say, “I didn’t like it much”. It wasn’t really surprising – his ‘world tour’ had been entirely funded by the government but seeing South Africa and India en route to the jungles of Burma to fight the Japanese in World War II wasn’t likely to have been the type of experience that he’d want to repeat. Throughout my childhood Grandad was prone to going on and on about the war and my sister and I developed the ability to fake a look of mild interest that would avoid offending him but not encourage him to continue. Like many of his generation, it had been an awful time but was undoubtedly the most interesting thing that happened during his life.

Sam Keery

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The Mabinogion are a collection of eleven prose stories that have a very large presence in Welsh literature. Drawing on pre-Christian Celtic mythology, folklore, and early medieval traditions, each of these tales is the product of a longstanding Welsh narrative tradition, and has been widely influential, especially since their translation into English. At the heart of the Mabinogion – the name given to this collection, as compiled and translated in English in the 19th century by Lady Charlotte Guest – is the four branches of heroic tales that make up the Mabinogi proper. The fourth branch, Math Fab Mathonwy (Math, son of Mathonwy) is the tale that has been re-imagined in Gwyneth Lewis’ The Meat Tree, one of Seren Books’ new stories from the Mabinogion collection.

Gwyneth Lewis, Myths

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The Luxe by Anna Godbersen is a novel set in New York in 1899, at the height of the super-rich society families for whom appearance was everything. It is about a group of young people, all of whom want to break the constraints of their lives in different ways and for different reasons.

The very first page of the novel is the funeral announcement for Elizabeth Holland. After a glimpse of the funeral, we are taken back in time to a few weeks before to find out what happens. This is a bit of a strange start, opening with the funeral of one of the main characters, but it does have a page-turning effect, as you always want to keep going to find out what happened to Elizabeth during what should have been a special time of her life.

Anna Godbersen

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