Showing results by publisher "Canongate Books" in Historical Fiction

Cal may only be twelve years old, but his father has threatened to throw him onto the streets if he doesn’t start earning his keep. Keen to prove himself, he unearths an opportunity through stealthy eavesdropping. Two gentlemen need help transporting an unnamed cargo across the Firth of Forth, no questions asked. Cal is happy to secure the job, but soon discovers that holding up his end will entangle him in a ruthless underworld of thievery, smuggling and body snatchers.

Sarah Thornhill is the youngest child of William Thornhill, convict-turned-landowner on the Hawkesbury River. Her stepmother calls her wilful, but handsome Jack Langland loves her and she loves him. 'Me and Jack', she thinks. 'How could it go wrong?' But there's an ugly secret in Sarah's family. That secret takes her into the darkness of the past, and across the ocean to the wild coasts of New Zealand.

Apprentice Sarah Fisher is helping to fund Dr Will Raven's emerging medical practice in exchange for being secretly trained as a medic, should the rules barring women ever change. Sarah needs no instruction in the inequalities that beset her gender, but even she has her eyes opened to a darker reality when a relative seeks her help in searching for her missing daughter. Annabel Banks was promised a situation in a prestigious household, but there has been no word from her since she left home, and the agency that arranged her position says she never appeared.

Edinburgh, 1853. Mesmerism is seeing a revival across the city. While most scientists avoid engaging with such quackery, the respected Dr Simpson has kept an open mind, testing hypnosis on his patients. But when Cora Carlton, socialite and wife of a wealthy entrepreneur, is mysteriously found dead in her home, whispers turn to rumours and rumours turn to fact, with all fingers pointing to her Doctor, Simpson. Desperate to clear their mentor's name, Dr Will Raven and Sarah Fisher join forces to find the truth about Cora's death.

Dolly Maunder is born at the end of the nineteenth century, when society's long-locked doors are just starting to creak ajar for determined women. Growing up in a poor farming family in rural New South Wales, Dolly spends her life doggedly pushing at those doors. A husband and two children do not deter her from searching for love and independence.

The year is 1742. Goody Brown, saved from drowning and adopted when just a babe, has grown up happily in the smuggling town of Winchelsea. Then, when Goody turns sixteen, her father is murdered in the night by men he thought were friends. To find justice in a lawless land, Goody must enter the cut-throat world of her father's killers. With her beloved brother Francis, she joins a rival gang of smugglers. Facing high seas and desperate villains, she also discovers something else: an existence without constraints or expectations, a taste for danger that makes her blood run fast.

India, 1857 - the year of the Great Mutiny, when Muslim soldiers turned in bloody rebellion on their British overlords. This time of convulsion is the subject of The Siege of Krishnapur, widely considered to the one of the finest British novels of the last 50 years. A witty and individual take on the many traditions and follies of Empire, it is also a gripping account of survival under siege, illuminating how extreme conditions can influence and affect people's behaviour and the human spirit.

In 1911, in the Scottish Border village of Sprouston, the young parish minister wrote to the Daily Mail for entry forms for its sweet pea competition. The top prize was a staggering £1000 and organisers predicted that as many as 15,000 would enter. He could not foretell that the paper's estimate of the number of competitors would be more than doubled, or that a fortnight before the deadline a nation-wide drought would threaten the very existence of the sweet peas he was so painstakingly cultivating.

Megan Melvick has spent years avoiding her inheritance, the dark and disquieting family estate Benbrae, now home only to her distant aristocratic father and her sister, Melissa, dying quietly in an upstairs bedroom. Trapped behind her unreliable hearing aids and vulnerable to what others want her to see, Megan is unable to find the answers she wants: why is there a new woman on her father's arm? And why has their absent mother not returned to say a final goodbye to Melissa?

Annie Perry is born beside the coal-muddied canals of the Black Country, at the height of the Industrial Revolution. The youngest in a large Romani family who cannot afford to keep her, when she is eight years old, Annie is sold as a servant to the famous and feared bare-knuckle boxer Bill Perry, The Tipton Slasher. Bill is starting to lose his strength, but refuses to give up his crown. When it looks like a fight might become Bill's last, Annie steps into the ring, fists raised in his defence.