Jeter Naslund, a great big historical novel about Marie Antoinette.
Naslund has a pretty good track record with me. Not only did she write Ahab’s Wife, which has its moments, very distinctly has its moments (although its version of Ahab is woefully anemic), but she wrote Sherlock in Love, which is a very good Sherlock Holmes pastiche novel (trust me, I’ve read ’em all, and good ones are hard to come by).
Read MoreOn May 20th, 1593, incendiary playwright Christopher Marlowe came before Queen Elizabeth I’s Privy Council to answer pointed questions about certain rumored opinions of his regarding the Protestant church and the Christian faith. The meeting’s conclusion was ambiguous: Marlowe walked out a free man (instead of being handed over to torturers, as happened to his flat mate and friend, Thomas Kyd, under identical circumstances), but he was ordered to keep himself instantly available to the Council—almost certainly a warning that further charges were pending. Ten days later, Marlowe was killed in a tavern in Deptford. The man who killed him received a royal pardon, and Marlowe was buried in an unmarked grave.
Read MoreIn R. W. Peake’s long, dense, utterly absorbing book Marching with Caesar: Conquest of Gaul, readers follow the story of Titus Pullus, who joined Julius Caesar’s legendary 10th Legion as a young man seeking to shed his bitter home life for the glory and adventure of the Legions.
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