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Every week Tanzanite features upcoming historical fiction and history related non-fiction books that have come to her attention and may be of interest to others. Since she has an out of control TBR pile, so should everyone else!
The Battle of Marathon in 490 BC was one of history's great turning points - the first time the Greeks managed to defeat the Persians in a pitched battle, it enabled the rise of classical Greek civilization. As John Stuart Mill famously put it, 'The Battle of Marathon, even as an event in British history, is more important than the Battle of Hastings.' Without it, the modern world as we know it would not exist. Christian Cameron's epic retelling of the battle will bring it alive, with all of its human drama and tragedy, as never before. The Greeks do not always behave well - in fact, many readers may come to see them as ignorant and bigoted as compared to the multi-cultural Persians, who for some, actually bring greater freedom - at least for a while.
The heroic Militiades, who led the Greeks at Marathon and then died in exile, a ruined man, was a fatally flawed character. His opponent, The Persian King Darius, was guilty of vaulting ambition and hubris, but he combined it with personal integrity and vast generosity. And in the middle, torn between two cultures, one of which has already made him a slave, we find Arimnestos - ancestor of the Kineas of the Tyrant books - nicknamed 'Killer of Men', he will lead a decisive contingent of infantry in the thickest of the battle...
Murderous intrigue brings Aelric - Blake's engaging, murderous antihero - to Damascus as the triumphant Muslim caliphate sweeps up from Arabia to threaten Constantinople itself. Aelric knows the secrets behind Greek Fire - the flame-throwers that have kept what is left of the once-mighty Roman empire safe until now. And he has very little choice about sharing them with the new rulers. Or so they think . . . for Aelric has not lost any of the cunning and courage that so far, have kept him alive.
Already an international bestseller, A Kingdom Divided continues the epic story of the Moghuls, one of the most magnificent and violent dynasties in world history.
India, 1530. Humayun, the newly crowned second Moghul emperor, is a fortunate man. His father, Babur, has left him wealth, glory, and an empire that stretches a thousand miles south of the Khyber Pass; he must now build on his legacy, and make the Moghuls worthy of their legendary forebear, Tamburlaine.
But, unbeknownst to him, Humayun is already in grave danger. His half brothers are plotting against him; they doubt that he has the strength, the will, the brutality needed to command the Moghul armies and lead them to still-greater glories. Soon Humayun will be locked in a terrible battle: not only for his crown, not only for his life, but for the existence of the very empire itself.
In his critically acclaimed debut thriller, Martyr, Rory Clements introduced readers to the unforgettable John Shakespeare, chief intelligencer to Queen Elizabeth I and older brother to Will.
Now, five years later, the Queen needs Shakespeare’s services once more. Not only is England still at war with Spain, but her court is riven by savage infighting among ambitious young courtiers.
Shakespeare is summoned by Elizabeth’s cold but deadly Privy Councillor Sir Robert Cecil and ordered to undertake two linked missions: to investigate the mystery of the doomed Roanoke colony in North America—Sir Walter Ralegh’s folly—and to spy on Cecil’s rival, the dashing Earl of Essex.
Essex is the brightest star in the firmament, the Queen’s favorite. But when Shakespeare enters Essex’s dissolute world, he discovers not only that the Queen herself is in danger, but that he and his family are also targets. With a plague devastating the country, Catholics facing persecution and martyrdom at the hands of an infamous torturer, and John’s own wife, Catherine, possibly protecting a priest—Shakespeare has his own survival to secure, as well as that of his fading but still feisty Queen.
Filled with the flavor and facts of a tumultuous time in English history, Revenger is a stunning novel of savage rivalries and reprisals from an author swiftly becoming a known master of historical suspense.
We think of the Inquisition as a holy war fought in the Middle Ages. But, as Cullen Murphy shows in this provocative new book, not only did its offices survive into the twentieth century, in the modern world its spirit is more influential than ever. Traveling from freshly opened Vatican archives to the detention camps of Guantánamo to the filing cabinets of the Third Reich, he traces the Inquisition and its legacy.
God’s Jury encompasses the diverse stories of the Knights Templar, Torquemada, Galileo, and Graham Greene. Established by the Catholic Church in 1231, the Inquisition continued in one form or another for almost seven hundred years. Though associated with the persecution of heretics and Jews—and with burning at the stake—its targets were more numerous and its techniques more ambitious.
The Inquisition pioneered surveillance and censorship and “scientific” interrogation. As time went on, its methods and mindset spread far beyond the Church to become tools of human face on a familiar but little-known piece of our past, and argues that only by understanding the Inquisition can we hope to explain the making of the present.
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