An ‘affectionate homage to Pride and Prejudice’: The best Historical fiction out now,

THE UNDOING OF VIOLET CLAYBOURNE by Emily Critchley (Zaffre £16.99, 400pp) 

The Undoing of Violet Claybourne is available now from the Mail Bookshop

A stern boarding school, a dilapidated country mansion and an old-fashioned asylum are the gloomily atmospheric settings for a gothic-tinged story that explores the troubled minds and volatile emotions of the Claybourne sisters and their erstwhile friend, the impressionable Gillian Larking in 1930s England. Unloved by her surviving parent, staid, sensible Gilly meets Violet at Heathcomb School. Violet is eccentric, an ‘overly imaginative, sensitive and passionate’ girl, who enacts a series of rituals to ward off danger, but whose adventurous spirit appeals to the stolid Gilly. Invited back to Thornleigh Hall for the holidays, Gilly’s swayed by the cool glamour of older sister Emmeline and fashionable, flighty Laura Claybourne and begins to betray Violet in the worst way. Taut, tense and melancholy, it’s a brilliantly claustrophobic study of gaslighting and manipulation, as a family’s ambitions overwhelm their better impulses. 

WHAT WILL PEOPLE THINK? by Vedashree Khambete-Sharma (Corvus £17.99, 400pp)

What Will People Think? is available now

 It’s 1970s in Vile Parle, a gossipy suburb of middle-class Mumbai, and the location for Mrs Bendre’s increasingly desperate search to find suitable, rich husbands for her four dowry-less daughters. There’s beautiful, kind Juee, flighty Bollywood-obsessed Latika, earnest Mary and the brilliantly opinionated Ila, the narrator of this affectionate homage to Pride And Prejudice. Ila has embraced feminism, eschewed the idea of a traditional marriage and is determined to carve out her own career – ideas that are anathema to her mother. But like her fictional antecedent, the independent Elizabeth Bennet, Ila is about to learn that pride can be problematic, as revealed by her argumentative exchanges with handsome, equally imperious Aniruddha. Fresh, funny and with vivid footnotes on Maharashtrian food, culture and attitudes courtesy of sarcastic, observant Ila, What Will People Think? is a lively reinterpretation of a timeless classic. 

BLACK WOOD WOMEN by Michael Stewart (HQ £16.99, 352pp) 

The grim and the glorious rub shoulders in this uneven journey into a dark, tempestuous period in English history. It’s 1649, and the repercussions of the Civil War are playing out across a country rife with religious persecution, and where the horror of witches has taken hold of an already fearful population. At the heart of this tale is Caragh, an orphaned Irish girl who flees her Yorkshire safe-haven after the brutal murder of her parents, and heads east in search of refuge. As she slinks through field, forest and marsh on the way to an unexpected encounter with a coven of women, her trek is mirrored by the plight of a pregnant lone wolf – and both of them are hunted by a vengeful ex-soldier. Stewart’s descriptions of nature are superb, but the violence meted out tells a more gruesome story.