First Thoughts
INTERNATIONAL best-selling author and historian Philippa Gregory, known for her novels chronicling the Tudors, has focused on the House of the Plantagenets for her third novel in the Cousins’ War series.
Those who have read The White Queen, which tells the story of Elizabeth Woodville, will know of her mother Jacquetta — the Lady of the Rivers.
She’s a fiercely independent woman who rebels against the monarchy by marrying for love, then carves out a life for herself and her family in England.
However, when her daughter Elizabeth follows her mother’s example and marries for love, it has terrible consequences. Not even Jacquetta’s magic can stop the family, and the country, from being torn apart.
This is yet another fabulous book from the Cousins’ War series, and Gregory’s painstaking historical research has certainly paid off.
It’s a brilliant read.
Robert Harris Hutchinson, €25.10; Kindle £7.69
ROBERT HARRIS’s eighth novel is a timely blockbuster of a thriller that takes the global financial meltdown as its backdrop, with nods to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Terminator franchise to boot.
Dr Alex Hoffmann is a physicist who has created an artificial intelligence, a computer algorithm that tracks human emotions and autonomously uses its observations to trade on the world’s financial markets — with incredible results.
Just as version four of Hoffmann’s uncannily successful algorithm goes live, a series of devastating, damning and violent events leaves the eccentric genius fearing for his sanity, his life and for humanity.
An assuredly intelligent and deftly-paced novel, the fear of the protagonist is increasingly palpable as he’s buffeted by genuinely unexpected spine-chilling twists.
Perhaps the greatest thriller writer around, Harris has delivered his best work yet.
A modern classic.
Peter Ackroyd Macmillan, £25; Kindle £8.79
AS anyone with a well-thumbed copy of London: The Biography on their bookshelves will know, Peter Ackroyd is a great example of that rare and unusual species: a readable historian.
Over the last 20 years, as he’s turned his considerable literary skill to sociology, history and biography, he’s become a national treasure.
Eight years after being awarded a CBE for services to literature, the writer has returned with his most ambitious project to date — a six-volume biography of British history.
Setting the scene for this monster project is Foundation, a scholarly amble from pre-historic swamp to the feudalist Middle Ages, with plenty of colour in between. The Viking hordes, Black Death and Wars of the Roses are given the Ackroyd treatment, springing to life like rarely before.
3,000 pages may seem a heavy task, but it’s worth the investment.
Jo NesboHarvill Secker, €12.99; Kindle €3.59
NORWEGIAN Jo Nesbo, lauded as the new Stieg Larsson, delivered the goods with previous novels The Leopard and The Snowman, and in Headhunters serves up a new hero, Roger Brown.
Keeping to his theme of unusual heroes, Nesbo makes his main character a successful headhunter, who’s an art thief on the side.
During this novel, which has more plot twists than a country house garden maze, Brown becomes involved in a heist that threatens to unravel his duplicitous career.
Headhunters was first published in Norway in 2008, and the film rights have since been sold.
If you have Scandinavian thriller writer fatigue, it’s worth noting that Nesbo has donated all royalties from the book, including the movie, to a charity that works to help reduce illiteracy.
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