The Tower

"I think Flora Carr is a smashing writer, with a particular talent for bringing characters to life and allowing them to really breathe on the page. From the opening lines, in which Mary stops to relieve herself on grass, we know we are being taken with a new intimacy into this woman’s life, whatever we think we already know about it – it’s very atmospheric. It’s also a brilliant idea – a Tudor prison break – so it’s tense, thrilling and compulsive from the start. But there’s a melancholy to the tale that Carr plays with perfectly – we all know what is going to happen to Mary, and that any heroic escape will be short-lived. She has this brilliant way of foreshadowing the fates of the characters, slipping into their futures, then bringing us back into their immediate struggles, which makes use of the reader’s position as knowing more than the people whose stories they are following. The overall effect makes for a fantastic and thought-provoking read. We really do seem to love a beheading – perhaps it’s something in the unique tension of that experience, the ritual of it, and the way its victims have to offer themselves to their death with compliance. It reminds me of the painting of Jane Grey’s execution at the National Gallery – the contrast in the youth and the darkness, the beauty and the horror. I think there’s also something of being killed simply for who you were that resonates with us. When and how death arrives for each of us is unpredictable, random and sometimes unjust – perhaps something the chill of this knowledge is present in our fascination."

"Flora Carr’s debut novel The Tower is a retelling of the 1567 imprisonment of Mary, Queen of Scots, in Lochleven Castle following the murder of her first husband and an uprising among her courtiers. The Tower focuses on Mary’s relationship with her ladies in waiting as they weather this bleak incarceration and the queen’s forced, humiliating abdication—all the while looking for an escape. If you love stories of courtly intrigue—and especially if you read and loved Denise Mina’s Rizzio , a fictionalised account of the events that immediately precede those of The Tower —then this will be the perfect next book for you. If you have enjoyed the recent flush of retellings of Greek myths, look out for Rosie Hewlett’s Medea— a “feminist” reworking of the story of Classical mythology’s most notorious heroine. It’s a follow-up to Hewlett’s bestselling debut Medusa . Needless to say, it won’t end well. And how historic does historical fiction have to be? I feel I should highlight Kristin Hannah’s epic coming-of-age tale The Women on the basis that it very nearly qualifies under the definition used by the Walter Scott Prize : that the book should be set at least sixty years before publication. The Women follows a young American debutante after she enlists as a nurse during the Vietnam War, and in so doing presents a fresh view of the conflict as seen through female eyes. In it, Frances ‘Frankie’ McGrath is catapulted from her comfortable upbringing in Southern California into traumatic wartime scenes that will leave her psychologically scarred. The Women tacks a tempestuous path through tragedy and romance; it’s a blockbuster read that will wring you dry, emotionally. More new historical fiction on Five Books"