Writing Historical Fiction: A Writers’ and Artists’ Companion

Historical fiction was once a polite description for romantic potboilers and bodice-rippers, but modern authors from Margaret Atwood to Edward Rutherford have helped to give the genre a literary facelift, raising the reputation – and sales – of novels set in the yesteryear. Fellow “eminent practitioners” Celia Brayfield and Duncan Sprott have combined personal experience of writing with advice from notable names including Tracy Chevalier, Michel Faber and Charles Palliser to provide stimulus and support for budding historical novelists. The fifth in a series of similar Writers’ and Artists’ Companions from Bloomsbury, Writing Historical Fiction is a handy, if not...