Henry V

Dan Jones
Apollo, £25, pp464

Jones is one of our liveliest historians, as well as one of the best informed, and his return to nonfiction after a novel-writing sabbatical elegantly marries the authority and depth of his previous histories with the brio and wit of his fiction. His reappraisal of one of England’s most celebrated but often misunderstood kings is as splendidly readable as ever, full of diverting incident and considered judgment on a man Jones clearly admires, but he is also aware that his reputation has been regrettably misappropriated rather too often.

Midnight in Vienna

Jane Thynne
Quercus, £20, pp432

Thynne’s previous two novels were excellent counterfactuals set in a Nazi-controlled Britain. Her latest book is set just before the second world war in the “real world”, and is every bit as gripping and surprising. Thynne’s heroine Stella Fry, a “spotter of mistakes”, is embroiled in a dark world of espionage and double-crossing after her job typing up an esteemed mystery writer’s new novel is brought to a sudden close by his death. The action moves between the elegance of Vienna and the paranoia of London with consummate readability.

Clairmont

Lesley McDowell
Wildfire, £9.99, pp400 (paperback)

The bicentennial of Lord Byron’s death has seen many responses to his life and work, but as McDowell’s enthralling novel demonstrates, the unfortunate women who were left in his wake have been undeservedly airbrushed out by posterity. Her protagonist is Claire Clairmont, a mistress of Byron’s who was unfortunate enough to give birth to his illegitimate daughter Allegra. Her life thereafter was made miserable by her lordly lover’s contemptuous neglect of them both, and McDowell ably depicts the inevitably tragic consequences.

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