The best historical fiction out now: Kin by Tayari Jones, Pixie by Jill Dawson, Cleopatra
Kin is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Kin by Tayari Jones (Oneworld £18.99, 368pp)
Affinity and affection are the touchstones of Jones’s warm, engaging fiction and they are on full display in this wonderful novel – her first since An American Marriage, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Jones’s writing is conversational, funny and brimful of sympathy for her characters and their faults, foibles and steadfast, heartfelt feelings.
Here she follows Annie and Vernice from the tiny town of Honeysuckle into their diverging futures in a segregated America. Vernice, whose mother was murdered by her father, heads to college, and a conventional marriage, while Annie takes a more ramshackle path as she attempts to find her ‘trifling’ mother, who abandoned her as a baby.
Narrated by the two women in alternating chapters, their undimmed sisterly friendship glows from the page.
Pixie is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Pixie by Jill Dawson (Bloomsbury £16.99, 400pp)
Dawson’s latest book takes a turn-of-the-century meander through the worlds of art and the occult in the company of endearing, eccentric Pamela Coleman Smith – the contradictory Pixie of the title.
Pixie was a real-life figure, well known in fin-de-siècle circles as a storyteller and illustrator of the iconic Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, but she’s faded into obscurity over time.
Dawson places her back in the limelight as Pixie, an enthusiastic narrator of her adventures, who attempts to make her living through her art following the death of her parents.
It’s a precarious endeavour, but Pixie approaches it with determination, as she rubs shoulders with W. B. Yeats and the infamous magician Aleister Crowley, and her staunch heart ‘staggers under the weight of these feelings about love and life and meaning’.
Cleopatra is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Cleopatra by Saara El-Arifi (Borough Press £18.99, 352pp)
Offered as a rebuttal to the biased Roman historians’ version of Cleopatra as an arch manipulator, wily seductress and ruthless tyrant, El-Arifi gives a contemporary perspective on the Egyptian Queen, as the regal ruler tells her own story.
Addressing the reader directly, she styles herself as a powerful Pharaoh concerned about the fate of her country and her legacy, but also as a devoted mother, a passionate lover, and learned healer.
There’s a gloss of glamour to El-Arifi’s portrayal, with beguiling descriptions of Cleopatra’s clothes and hairstyles, and a dash of Hollywood romance in her interactions with Mark Antony, alongside the dangerous rivalries. Compelling.