Summer reading recs: English court intrigue, Papal court intrigue, dragons meet Napoleon in Russia and literary noir close to home

Four novels, all set to be published this summer. All four are probably not to most people’s reading taste but they all were to mine.

Queen’s Gambit is the story of Katherine Parr, the final and surviving wife of Henry VIII. She’s got an interesting story and it’s told well both from her perspective and that of a servant, Dot, whom she brings from her own household to serve her when Katherine (reluctantly) becomes Queen. Even if you think you’ve read or watched everything you need to about the Tudors, this is worth a read, especially since it covers a relatively unexamined person and part of the story. Its perspective on Elizabeth is especially interesting, both from Katherine’s view and from Dot’s. As everyone who knows anything about Elizabeth knows, she and her final stepmother were close — until Katherine caught her last husband, the ambitious, vain Thomas Seymour, playing some sort of naughty bed game with the young adolescent Elizabeth. While Katherine was pregnant with his child. I was dreading that part of the story even though I knew it was coming — but Fremantle handles it with an interesting approach. A debut novel by Elizabeth Fremantle, who appears to be a worthy addition to the Tudor-writing historical fiction ranks. The book is scheduled for release on Aug. 6.

Blood & Beauty is about the Borgias, another telegenic Renaissance-era family (also the subject of a pay-cable drama from the same folks who brought us The Tudors). Sarah Dunant sets her books in medieval and Renaissance Italy and the Borgias offer incredible scope. I knew little about them, beyond their historical reputation as a bunch of depraved poisoners — this book provided a much better rounded portrait especially of Lucrezia, daughter of the ambitious Rodrigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI). Even her ruthless brother Cesare is understandable, if not necessarily sympathetic. I enjoyed it thoroughly and look forward to the next installment — though it led me to some confusion over the dramatic choices in the Showtime series. But hey, I knew from watching the Tudors that the guy behind those shows is not all that concerned with historical accuracy so I’m going to assume Sarah Dunant’s sticking closer to the record until I learn otherwise. Dunant is probably best known for In the Company of the Courtesan; she may go stratospheric (into Philippa Gregory-like sales levels) with this one. Blood & Beauty publishes July 16.

Blood of Tyrants is speculative/alternative/fantastic historical fiction — the latest and apparently penultimate volume in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series. I’ve blogged about this series before — the previous entry, Crucible of Gold was one of my favorite books from last year — and this is a worthy successor. As it opens, our hero Will Laurence has been shipwrecked on the shores of Japan and has amnesia. So even though most of his shipmates and fellow aviators think he’s dead and “his” dragon, Temeraire, desperately wants to find him, Laurence thinks he’s still an officer in the British Navy and has no memory of the last eight years, ie. the time he’s spent with Temeraire and learned a hell of a lot about dragons (and encountered Napoleon personally, and been court-martialed, and been made a prince in China and nearly died in both Africa and Australia and …  well these are adventure books, OK?). The series is often described as Patrick O’Brian with dragons and that works — it’s set in the British military during the Napoleonic wars. And it is cool to imagine military aviation coming into play a few centuries before it actually did, and how that might have altered things and worked in the culture of the time (few know it outside of the aviation corps, but there are a number of female officers because one particularly valuable breed of dragon, the poison-fanged Longwings, will only abide women as their captains). But the true appeal of the series, for me, is the way it fulfills an animal lover’s fantasy of bonding with intelligent, emotional beings who can, in this world, speak and express their opinons, sometimes irrational as they may seem (all dragons covet treasure and want to see their humans kitted covered in the Regency-era equivalent of bling whenever possible). I found myself, when reading this book, thinking of the relationship I’ve had with dogs and horses and how it often feels like you are holding conversations with them — and how you feel a responsibility for their care and happiness that goes far beyond mere ownership. It will be interesting to see how Novik winds up the series — this book ends with Napoleon on the march in Russia but she has previously shown no problem with materially altering history (Napoleon is currently married to an Incan princess) and kudos to her for the last line, which I won’t spoil here but which has to be a nod to that other dragon-loving fantasy writer, George R.R. Martin. Blood of Tyrants publishes on Aug. 13 — if you haven’t read the previous seven entries in the series, that would make an excellent –and fun! — summer reading project. I will be sorry to see this series end but will try to view it as I do my favorite TV shows when they go away after a few seasons — better to go out with quality than trail on forever just because someone is willing to pay you to do so.

One of these books is not like the others, as the old Sesame Street ditty goes. Men in Miami Hotels is a contemporary noir, set in Key West but it’s a wholly different creature from the usual subtropical mystery/detective novel — it has more in common with the work of Thomas McGuane than Carl Hiaasen or James Hall. Cot Sims is a journeyman gangster for a Miami crime lord. He returns to his hometown of Key West to help his mother, who has been kicked out of her hurricane-damaged home by code enforcers and is camped out underneath. It is recognizably Key West in a lot of keenly observed ways, though a smaller less transient — and more violent — island than the real one (it appears to be a Key West inhabited entirely by Conchs and visiting Miami gangsters). Sims quickly gets himself into serious trouble by stealing a bunch of emeralds from his Miami crime boss and is basically on the lam from then on, throughout Key West, mainland South Florida and eventually Havana. I particularly liked the action in the cemetery, where Cot spends some time hiding out in a friend’s family crypt. I’ll admit that I admired this book but didn’t find it captivating the way some crime fiction that is considered genre can captivate me (most recently, Lyndsay Faye’s Gods of Gotham). But for those who prefer their crime with a more literary approach, or who read in order to admire language, this is a great read and I hope it finds its audience. It deserves to. Men in Miami Hotels will be released July 2.

Write Down the Title and Read This Book

The great children’s book writer E.L. Konigsburg died over the weekend, a piece of news I barely noticed in all the emotional tumult of the news from Boston. Like millions of other book-loving kids, I loved From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler — it described exactly the sort of running away experience I wished I were cool and smart enough to pull off. She won the Newbery Medal for that book and again in 1997 for The View from Saturday. But the book of hers that I love the most — and recommend to readers both young and not-so-much to this day — is A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver. I am so very glad it is in the collection of the library where I work so I can read it again every couple of years.

The only bad thing I have to say about this book is that its title is impossible to remember. And I still don’t even know what miniver is. How Konigsburg got away with her long and obscure titles beats me (her first book is called Jennifer, Hecate, MacBeth, William McKinley and me, Elizabeth). It must have been before marketing departments had much sway in publishing houses.

But write the title down and get hold of this book if you have the slightest interest in history, medieval history, women’s history any of that. This is the story of Eleanor of Acquitaine. And what a premise — it is recounted by Eleanor herself, along with several people she knew during various periods of her life. They’re in heaven, waiting to see if her second husband, Henry II of England, will be allowed out of purgatory to join them. It was the origin of my lifelong fascination with Eleanor — any woman who had been Queen of France, then run away with a younger man to become Queen of England — had my attention. Her other adventures along the way — like joining her first husband on a Crusade, or joining her sons in rebellion against her second husband — just added to the allure. Plus all that cool medieval stuff. It’s just brilliant.

Old and new favorites

Great thing about working in a library: I spend a lot of time working with books — checking them out to patrons, shelving them, scouting reviews, getting advanced copies.

One small downside: I almost never browse for a book any more, or am caught by surprise by a new title from a favorite author.

Recently, though, I came across a couple historical novels — one by Tracy Chevalier, whom I like a lot, and one a first novel that appeared on our New Books shelf without my having read any advanced press.

The Last Runaway is Tracy Chevalier’s first book set in the U.S. so I’ll admit I was dubious at first. But the lead character drew me in from the first (not only because I sympathized with her seasickness as she crossed the Atlantic from England to America in the 19th century and realized the voyage was so traumatizing that she could never cross again). It’s set in a Quaker community in Ohio before the Civil War — so the Underground Railroad was active as slaves made their way to Canada. The Quaker community, while opposing slavery in general, is divided in how far they should go in helping runaways even as the Fugitive Slave Act increased the pressure on them to help those trying to recapture the runaways.

Chevalier is best known for Girl With A Pearl Earring but my favorite of hers remains The Lady and the Unicorn (I’m the medieval-adoring geek who will go see those tapestries over and over again). I also liked Burning Bright, her book set around William Blake, and Remarkable Creatures, about English women who were fossil hunters in the 19th century.

The new book was Accidents of Providence by Stacia Brown, a first novel set in 17th century England — a period that is neglected compared to the overpowering Tudors but offers a rich landscape as the country went through Civil War and conflict over religion and political structures that divided families, classes and communities. The story revolves around the fate of an unmarried woman who bears a child and buries its corpse — requiring the state to charge her with murder, whether the child was stillborn or not.

The jacket copy says Brown wrote this book using material from her dissertation on martyrs in 17th century England. I hope we’ll see more fiction from her, and hope the book is successful enough to inspire others to write about this period in English history.

Another newish historical novel I read recently didn’t spring on me unawares as the previous two but it’s well worth a read, especially if you like historical crime fiction and are looking for something on American shores. The Gods of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye is set in 1840s New York, as the city is recovering from a catastrophic fire and establishing its first real police force. Another major factor is the increase in Irish immigration — viewed as a Catholic invasion by some Protestant residents — that is about to be increased manyfold by the potato famine. I first gave this book a try months ago and I’ll admit I was turned back by the language — Faye has goen to great lengths to use the terms of the time but it felt forced on my initial attempt. For some reason, on my second attempt, it won me over and I was soon enthralled. If you liked Caleb Carr’s early novels, this would be a good one to try. Also recommended for people like me, who are tired of waiting for C.J. Sansom to get back to Shardlake or Ruth Downie to tell us what the medicus has been up to lately in Roman Britain.

Key West Literary Seminar: Session 1 download

Colm Toibin at the 2013 Key West Literary Seminar, Writers on Writers. Photograph by Nick Doll.

Session 1 of this year’s Key West Literary Seminar wrapped up yesterday. If you missed it, I suspect recordings will be showing up soonish on the Seminar’s audio archive site. And we’re getting particularly good coverage this year on Littoral, the Seminar blog and from WLRN, the public radio station in Miami. If you’re Twitter-inclined, check out the hashtag #kwls – you’ll even see eminences like Judy Blume and James Gleick chiming in along with us lesser mortals in the audience. This year is not as Twitterific as last but we don’t have William Gibson and Margaret Atwood with us (though Gibson is scheduled to return next year — don’t wait too long to sign up for 2014′s Seminar, The Dark Side, because it’s selling fast). As has quickly become tradition, Jason Rowan is back making custom-crafted cocktails, tailored to the year’s theme. Keep an eye on his blog, Embury Cocktails, for recipes and more information in the near future.

Phyllis Rose opened with a wonderful keynote address Thursday night, examining John Hersey (for whom the Thursday event is named) as a lens through which to view the whole writer vs. person question. Is the man Key Westers saw riding his bike around the island the same person who wrote “Hiroshima” and “A Bell for Adano”? The answer is, of course, no and yes. Rose was also refreshingly dismissive about the overwhelming adoption of deconstruction and other French-influenced critical approaches toward literature, which tortured those of us who were English majors in the latter part of the 20th century and dared to think that writers’ lives and times might influence their work. For literary scholars who didn’t feel like sacrificing themselves on the altars of Derrida and Foucault, literary biography became “a welcome oasis during the desert years of deconstruction,” Rose said. “Writers about writers were rescued by readers who wanted to know about writers’ lives.”

A sporadic sample from the rest of the weekend:

From Judith Thurman, biographer of Isak Dinesen and Colette and staff writer for The New Yorker:

• “Fiction is high-minded betrayal and biography is dirty-minded fidelity.”
• One of Thurman’s early jobs was translating pornographic movies. “It’s freelance work that I heartily recommend because it’s easy — you just have to understand the words ‘Yes…. yes!’ and ‘More!’”
• Translation is “yoga for the mind and for the ear.”
• “One definition of the truth is that which is untranslatable.”

From Brenda Wineapple, biographer of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Gertrude and Leo Stein, author of a book about Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

• On her subjects: “I prefer them deader and deader.”
• Emily Dickinson is “the elusive subject par excellence.”
• Oscar Wilde quote: “Biography adds new terror to death.”

Most amazing fact learned at this year’s Seminar (so far):

• Bram Stoker based the character of Dracula on Walt Whitman (amazing fact supplier: Mark Doty). Edmund White followed this with a comment on why vampire is so often code for gay in literature: “You meet someone, you kiss them and you turn them into you.”

The inevitable end-of-year best list

My list of best books I read this year is composed of books that were published this year, at least in fiction. That’s not usually the case, but I think it’s part of the deal with working at a library (and getting ever-increasing access to advanced review copies, both in print and digitally).

Fiction:

This year for me, fictionally, was all about the sequels. Like everyone else I adored Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning follow-up to her Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall. If you can’t get enough of the Tudor era, having a fine novelist at the top of her form inhabit that era — from a previously underrepresented viewpoint, that of Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell — is literary nirvana.

Also in Tudor-land but with a contemporary, and paranormal, perspective was Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness, sequel to her blockbuster A Discovery of Witches. In this book, the protagonists travel back to the time of Elizabeth I in search of answers about their history, their destiny and the powers of academic scholar and reluctant witch Diana Bishop. The best shorthand description I can come up with for these books is Harry Potter for Grownups.

I also loved Crucible of Gold, the seventh entry in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series Napoleonic Wars — with dragons! No honestly, it’s awesome — of course thanks to George R.R. Martin and HBO dragons have a little more cultural cache than when I first started raving about this series. To be perfectly honest, the last couple entries weren’t as engaging as the first three, but I was invested enough in the series to keep going and I’m so glad I did.  The newest book is definitely back on track. Here’s hoping she keeps going with this story as long as Patrick O’Brian did with his Aubrey-Maturin series.

Nonfiction:

I’m going to go with the collected works of Rick Geary, who does historical true crime in graphic format under the rubric A Treasury of Victorian Murder and A Treasure of 20th Century Murder. I read a bunch of them this year and I can’t pick a favorite. They’re all fantastic.

I also loved Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer, his memoir/meditation on not really getting down to writing a critical study of D.H. Lawrence, though the book does include many interesting considerations of Lawrence as Dyer checks out various Lawrence hangouts. Dyer will be here for the Key West Literary Seminar next month (both sessions!) and I am simultaneously dying to hear him in person and terrified to hear what he’ll have to say about Key West. He is hysterically, viciously funny on the less appealing characteristics of various tourist towns he visits in Out of Sheer Rage so I’m guessing we’ll be in for it from him, sooner or later.

Honorable mentions:

People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry – Contemporary true crime done extremely well, with nuance and compassion. Blessedly free of sensationalism and righteousness.

Live By Night by Dennis Lehane — Another sequel of sorts, a follow up to The Given Day and even better, in my opinion. Set in Boston and Tampa during Prohibition. Fans of Boardwalk Empire should check it out.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn — The bestseller that keeps on going — and for good reason. I gulped this one down in just a couple sittings.

The Twelve by Justin Cronin — Yes, yet another sequel, this one to the post-viral-vampire-apocalyptic The Passage. He jumps around in time and wields a huge cast of characters and you manage to stay with him. As with Mantel and Harkness, I’m now trying not to count the days until the final installment in the trilogy.

I can’t get enough of end-of-the year best lists. If you’re like me you can’t do better than this source, a blog by Large-hearted Boy. In the individual list category, I loved this one. And I appreciate the large-mindedness of NPR in their different categories. They even acknowledge that smart people read romance!

Time to get reading some Writers on Writers

I love this time of year for a few reasons. Holiday decorations in Key West are fun and appear to be getting more fun every year. I love the best of the year book lists that come out around now, to compare my own reading and to get ideas for books I might have missed. And I love the annual library display of books by writers appearing at the upcoming Key West Literary Seminar.  The theme this time is Writers on Writers and the works encompass straight-up biography, meditative memoir and novels with real writers as fictional characters. Lots more detail, including the writers appearing and the schedules for both sessions, is available on the Seminar website. You can still register!

The books by this year’s authors include some serious — as in long and demanding attention — books. But don’t let that discourage you. While you may not be up for wading through a magisterial Literary Biography, especially during the distractions of the holiday season, there are plenty of other books that you may find surprisingly entertaining, as well as edifying.

We’ve just put up a display of books by Seminar writers at the Key West Library so if you’re in town stop by and check it out (the display is in the Reference Department, turned over the summer into a more open reading room if you haven’t been in recently).

Hype, lived up to

As I rapidly approach what can only be called middle age (gulp), I do not think I am becoming more conservative in my personal or political views. If anything, I’m heading in the opposite direction. I am, however, developing a serious contrarian streak, which means if some book or movie is nearly universally praised by the people and media outlets to which I pay attention, a strong inner resistance kicks in. Which is why I haven’t seen Brokeback Mountain, or The Artist. And why I haven’t read Jonathan Franzen, or Ann Patchett. I would probably enjoy or be enlightened by them if I did. I just don’t want to succumb to my own self-constructed framework of cultural peer pressure.

Yeah, I know. That doesn’t make any sense.

Fortunately, I had other reasons to take a look at Gillian Flynn’s latest novel, Gone Girl, which is accomplishing that rare trifecta of critical acclaim, genre respect and bestseller status. I read her first novel, Sharp Objects, because a friend recommended it and because she was a writer for Entertainment Weekly, a magazine I like lot. Sharp Objects kept me up very late reading it, the very definition of a page-turner, even though its genre (thriller) isn’t my usual thing.

Gone Girl, as you may have read in several other places, has the same page-turning quality but Flynn has gotten better, fiendish in her plotting and almost unbearably smart in her characterizations. The unbearable-ness comes from the points of view of the characters themselves, especially Nick Dunne, who is suspected of doing away with his wife, Amy, after she disappears on their fifth wedding anniversary. Nick’s real-time first-person account is interspersed with entries from Amy’s diary from the previous seven years, tracking their relationship from giddy courtship to cool New York City couple (with a lovely brownstone in, where else, Brooklyn) to their current less cool and unhappy post-recession residence in Nick’s hometown of Carthage, Missouri.

Any plot spoilers would negate a lot of the reason to read this book so I’m going to stop here. All I’ll say is I’m glad I had good reason to overcome my contrarian impulses and give this book a read. Especially if you like psychological suspense and even if that isn’t your usual thing, it’s worth it.

Stuck in the middle again

Dammit. Now I’m caught up on three different trilogies and am facing a wait of at least a year on each.

I guess it’s good news that each of the middle installments made me even more eager for the third.

The first was Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, sequel to her Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall. And the sequel just made the longlist for this year’s Booker; how cool would that be? The second was Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness, second in her All Souls trilogy about star-crossed witch Diana Bishop and vampire Matthew de Clermont. I liked that one so much I went and re-read the first book, A Discovery of Witches, and liked it way better on a second read. The third middle book was The Twelve, the follow-up to Justin Cronin’s bestseller The Passage, a post-apocalyptic vampire epic. (Note to Twilight/All Souls/True Blood fans: These are not sexy kind of vampires.) The Twelve one doesn’t publish until October but I got an advanced review copy and devoured it in four days. Three of which I was working for eight of my waking hours.

It’s funny but reading, and liking very much, Cronin’s work doesn’t make me want to go out and get Stephen King’s The Stand, the book to which it is frequently compared. I’d be more inclined to check out other dystopias except we’ve had a lot of that with the recent Key West Literary Seminar and all. If anything the books remind me most of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, just for their masterful plotting and command of huge casts of characters and multiple settings. In Cronin’s case that even includes jumping around in time quite a bit and he still pulls it off. At several points in this book he would start with a whole new time, place and group of people and my initial thought would be, come on! I want to know what’s going on with Peter and Lish, and how am I supposed to keep all these people, places and times straight? And then found myself getting totally absorbed anyway. Definitely the mark of a good storyteller. Now if only he (and our friend Martin) would write faster.

Why this image for this blog post? Well, there are, appropriately, TWO reasons. Anyone want to take a guess what they are?

Finally finishing a book about not really writing a book about D.H. Lawrence

Last night I finished reading Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer. According to my record on LibraryThing, where I obsessive-compulsively record such things, I started reading it on March 6. So it took me more than four months to read a 256-page book.

First up: It was great. More on that later.

I have good excuses. I had a couple other things going on. Moving, mainly, which involved organizing, and packing, and holding a yard sale and unpacking. Most of our books remain in boxes since we still haven’t built the Wall of Bookshelves. All that chaos meant I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to appreciate Dyer’s dry, funny, smart observations on literature and himself. It was easier to dive in to various kinds of genre novels and a true crime book. And I went out of town for a week and that meant I had to read a Patrick O’Brian book because I only read those when I travel and I rarely travel these days. Besides, procrastinating on reading a book that is, in large part, about why and how we avoid doing the things we supposedly want to do, seemed appropriate.

But I kept the book near the surface level of the moving chaos and eventually finished it and am extremely glad I did. Dyer is hysterically funny, writing about his journey to write (or not write) a critical study of D.H. Lawrence, which winds up being this book instead, a memoir of sorts and meditation on the creative process and, not least, on Lawrence and his choices in life.

I especially loved Dyer’s rant about academic literary criticism, which is over the top but perfectly expresses the fury many of us feel toward the current “official” approach to literature by its self-appointed judges who appear to be interested only in finding reasons to tear it apart and blame it for humanity’s evil excesses, and then express their findings in repellent prose. Who needs it? Dyer speaks for those of us who love reading, and wind up majoring in English or studying literature in some fashion but are horrified by the way academia handles the field.

There’s one other good reason to read this book if you’re in Key West or interested in coming to Key West this January: Dyer will be here for the Key West Literary Seminar’s upcoming session, Writers on Writers. We’re holding two sessions — the first is sold out but there’s still room in the second, Jan. 17-20. And Dyer will be here for both, along with an impressive roster of fellow writers. Can’t wait to find out if he’s as funny and interesting in person as he is on the page (though after reading his comments on Rome, Santa Fe and Taos, I fear a little for Key West in future essays).

Harry Potter for grownups, or realistic fantasy

Lots of books get described as Harry Potter for grownups. Deborah Harkness’ work is the closest I’ve seen to truly fitting the bill. (Other contenders include Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I haven’t read yet, and Lev Grossman’s Magician books, which I read and liked but consider to be far more Narnia-infused than Potterian, despite the action surrounding teen magicians at a special magical academy.)

When A Discovery of Witches came out, I read it and liked it though I fear I may have read it too fast — it just felt like the crises were too many and piled on top of each other too quickly.

But I knew I was going to read Shadow of Night, the second in a planned trilogy, especially since the protagonists — witch Diana Bishop and her vampire lover Matthew de Clermont — were planning to travel back in time to 1590, the Elizabethan era. The book publishes in July but I got my hands on an advance review copy (one of the benefits of being a librarian) and devoured it in just a few days. Then I went back and bought a copy of A Discovery of Witches — despite the fact that we have two copies in our branch of the library alone. And enjoyed re-reading it thoroughly; my earlier concerns about it just being Too Much seem to have disappeared. Perhaps a couple doses of George R.R. Martin gave me some perspective. Or maybe it really was my own fault for reading it too fast.

If you’re vampire-curious, these are far, far better written than the Twilight series or the Sookie Stackhouse novels. If you like some romance in your reading, these have that, too, without many of the conventions and, yes, cliches that define so much romance fiction. If  you like old manuscripts and ancient conspiracies, set in academic libraries and old family castles, they’ve got that — and I don’t even want to mention Dan Brown in the same sentence, these are So. Much. Better.

So why call them Harry Potter for grownups? Because they fit into the same realm of realistic fantasy, a sort of yang to the yin of fantastic realism. While much of what gets labeled fantasy fiction takes place in some alternate universe or a mythical planet, the Harry Potter books, and these, take place in a world we recognize easily as our own — only it happens to also be occupied by supernatural beings (which we always kind of hoped would be the case, right?). In J.K. Rowling’s world, and Harkness’, we can easily imagine ourselves living our daily lives, interacting with these witches and wizards and vampires and daemons. In Harkness’ books, daemons are creative but often unstable, or as one witch puts it, “rock stars and serial killers.” In the second book, Christopher Marlowe is a daemon, and a remarkably unstable one at that. Some people, like Queen Elizabeth, know about the existence of vampires and witches and the witchhunting craze at the time takes on even more sinister cast when there are real witches in danger of persecution simply because of who they are.

She also handles the attractions and dangers of time travel in the most deft way I’ve read since Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book. From speech to clothing to the possibility of screwing up your own future existence — or, in this case, revealing the fate of a being who thinks he is immortal — it’s all handled with the same straightforward approach. Magical realism has had quite a heyday. With vampires, werewolves and zombies all the rage, I’m ready now for realistic magic and I’d put Harkness at the front of the pack.