The best historical books of the month to transport you back in time: A.E. Goldin, Lissa

MURDER IN CONSTANTINOPLE by A. E. Goldin (Pushkin Vertigo £16.99, 352pp) 

A STRANGE serial killer, a mercurial love interest and vividly described locations – from poor and posh London to the palaces and harems of Constantinople – set the scene for a rip-roaring adventure in the company of rapscallion Ben Canaan.

It’s 1854 and smart, streetwise Ben is bored. Fed up with working in his father’s tailoring business in the East End, he and his gang of ne’er-do-well friends have taken to some low-level criminality, which lands him in the bad books of a gangster.

Needing to escape, and haunted by the memories of a love affair with the mysterious Elizabeth de Varney, Ben sets sail for the Ottoman Empire on her trail and becomes embroiled in a zip-along plot, packed full of political machinations, strange deaths and ruinous romance. 

SMALL BOMB AT DIMPERLEY by Lissa Evans (Doubleday £18.99, 320pp) 

THE war is over and reluctant heir Corporal Valentine Vere-Thissett is heading back to his down-at-the-heel stately home, Dimperley. 

Saddled with debt and riddled with damp and architecturally awkward, dilapidated Dimperley seems doomed.

Its eccentric inhabitants are equally impractical. 

Valentine can’t compete with the charisma of his dashing, departed brother; their spitfire of a mother, Lady Irene, is irate and unreasonable; Uncle Alaric is uselessly engaged in writing a history of the house and wistful widow Lady Barbara, her clothing ‘trailing or askew’, is entirely ineffectual.

Hope for the house and the family appears in the shape of Zena Baxter, Alaric’s enterprising secretary, who longs to rescue Dimperley from the doldrums in this perfectly pitched, funny tale, sprinkled with peppery observations and speckled with a poignant bitter-sweetness.

THE GLASSMAKER by Tracy Chevalier (Borough Press £20, 400pp)

 THERE’S a liquid charm to Tracy Chevalier’s latest novel, which has its flaws – like the glass that Orsola Rosso attempts to make in her brother’s workshop on the Venetian island of Murano.

It opens in 1486, and wings its way across some 500 years, while the characters age much more slowly.

 Orsola is a fiery, recalcitrant child at the start of this inventive tale, but only in her late 60s when the novel ends in the present day, explained by a nod to magic realism and the suggestion that Venice and its islands ‘have always felt frozen in time’.

It’s a distraction to the real heart of the story – Orsola and her resourcefulness as she refines her skills in a male-dominated profession, alongside her lively interactions with her family and a lingering love.