The Book of Night Women

"This is Marlon James’ second novel, and it’s set on a Jamaican sugar plantation. It tells the story of Lilith, who is born into slavery and orphaned at birth by her 13-year-old mother. She’s one of the many slave girls raped by the white masters so she is, unsurprisingly, forced to grow up very fast and begins to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman. It’s not an easy read, but it is an incredible story. Again, it’s got the most astonishing narrative voice, where the rhythms of her speech really come through. Marlon James’ use of Jamaican patois always feels very strong and has its own internal rhythm. The novel is not just about Lilith, it’s about six half sisters—or ‘night women’—who are all the product of rape and who form a clandestine sisterhood to formulate the overthrow of their white oppressors. He manages to weave Lilith’s narrative together with others’ in a way that is neither derivative or contrived. It’s probably a story that some people might say is not historical crime, in that it is not a murder mystery, but it starts with the product of rape and it is the story of abuse and slavery and resilience. It’s a very powerful novel, and—again—one that has a memorable, unique voice. My own novels are set all over the place, both historically and geographically, and each era and place that I’ve worked in has definitely had a different view of society and a different mindset. That becomes part of the work, because you can’t render a time accurately without showing what people were thinking, and what their moral codes were. When I was writing about 18th-century Paris for The Clockwork Girl , what struck me very much when I was reading about the era was the stark breach between the rich and the poor and the prejudices that existed against the poor, so that then became a key part of the novel, which is partly about the value of human life. So, yes, I think each era has its own belief systems, and they will inevitably become part of the novel. The Book of Secrets is based on a real case from 1659 in Rome, called the ‘Spana Prosecution’, where a group of women were investigated and prosecuted for making and selling poison to other women, mainly to do away with nasty husbands, and some fathers and brothers. I’ve made it a sort of cat and mouse game between Girolama, the woman at the centre of the web, and Stefano Bracchi, who was the real investigating judge responsible for getting to the truth. And there is a third woman, Anna Conti, who is in an abusive marriage and is working out how to escape. It’s not a murder mystery detective novel in that we know fairly early what’s going on. What we don’t know is who is going to survive, who is going to succeed, and who we will want to root for. I work for the Centre for Women’s Justice as a consultant, doing work with survivors, trying to get the police or Crown Prosecution Service to take action. So I see a lot of injustice and unfairness and a lot of abusive men who are never properly dealt with, particularly men in positions of power. That inevitably comes through in my writing. It was why I was particularly interested in the Girolama Spana case. It’s why my latest modern Anna Sharpe novel, Notes on a Drowning , is a legal thriller about men in positions of power abusing that power. We write about the things we care about, don’t we? I never use real cases, but some of the anger that comes from my work goes into my writing. When I look at the books I’ve chosen, I realise that they are all about women who have great agency within the novel, despite their constraints. They’re all narrated with a very distinctive and clear voice. In Alias Grace , for example, we have Grace herself, who is a very smart, sly character who uses the most incredible imagery. When I think back on that book, I don’t just remember the words, I remember the pictures. With each of these novels, you’re immediately hooked in by the narrator and the story, and you don’t feel like you’re reading ‘ historical fiction ’ necessarily. All the novels I’ve mentioned reflect what the era was truly like, but they also resonate because they have quite a modern take on themes explored. I also want to say that it was extremely hard to decide on this selection, because there are so many other books that could have gone on this list. I didn’t include Thomas Harris or Maria McCann or Andrew Taylor or so many other of my favourites—there are so many that could have been included. It’s a very rich genre, especially if you interpret it widely. It’s been a lovely process for me to go through and think about which historical crime novels have been my favourites, and why."