Five Books For Time Travel

Transport yourself

Nov 10, 2024

*Portrait of Frederick Sluysken* by Ferdinand Bol, c. 1644. Zoom in on the boy’s front foot to see what looks suspiciously like a Nike swoosh. Could time travel be real after all?

Welcome to Five Books For, a newsletter for people who love great stories. I’m so happy you’re here.

I used to think that the closest we could come to time travel (at least for now) is our sense of smell. Somehow there's nothing so evocative as a scent that you haven’t smelled for years suddenly hitting you and taking you right back to the last moment you smelled it. However, when it comes to eras we haven’t experienced ourselves, reading books set in a different time can bring it vividly alive for us in a way that can be otherwise difficult to access. I know of course that any fictional account of a different time is impossible to get completely right, but as an exercise in trying to feel what it might have been like to live through a particular era, I don’t think books can be beaten (although certainly there are some movies and TV series that also do a great job of this).

With that in mind, I thought it would be fun to share a few historical fiction books this month. You’ll find a variety of times and places featured, and a few different genres and formats too. As ever, I hope you find something new to surprise and delight you.

Okay, let’s dive in!

The Suspicions Of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale

“Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional -- to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. ‘The detective story,’ observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, ‘is a tragedy with a happy ending.’ A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death.”

So what’s it about? This award-winning narrative non-fiction book - historical true crime, if you like - explores a real-life murder that took place in 1860 in a quiet Wiltshire village and the story of Mr. Whicher, Scotland Yard’s finest detective, who was sent to investigate.

When three-year old Saville Kent is found brutally murdered, the case soon becomes one of the most famous cases of its time. Whicher is one of Scotland Yard’s most celebrated detectives and one of the founding members of the detective unit; when he is sent to Wiltshire to investigate, his suspicion that it was a family member who committed the crime causes a scandal that damages his career and revolts society at large. Society’s reluctance to believe that such a thing could happen within a family rather than at the hand of a stranger, coupled with a lack of forensic techniques to aid the investigation, means that it takes years before the true killer is found and Whicher’s reputation is redeemed.

What’s great about it? It is meticulously researched and never sensationalises what is a truly terrible crime; rather, Summerscale explores not only the crime itself but also the mores of the time and the means that investigators had at their disposal, as well as the impact the murder had on English society at the time and in the coming years. Several books were later based on the case, including the first-ever sensation novel as well as classics including The Mystery Of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens and The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. There is plenty of fascinating historical detail about how the detectives of Scotland Yard pursued their investigations but the book is never dry or boring; instead, Summerscale keeps the pace up and in structure it reads much like a mystery novel, so you’re always keen to turn the page and keep reading. With the countryside home setting, and the diagrams and maps, it feels a little like a classic country house murder mystery, but there’s no cosiness to be found here. It’s impossible to forget that this was a real family, reeling from a terrible loss, and Summerscale does a great job of balancing all of those elements to make a truly compelling book which never forgets that it’s based on real events.

Give it a try if: you like true crime but find most of it too salacious; you love mysteries; you love reading about real people; you love books about the Victorians; you’re interested in the history of detection; you like more literary true crime like Capote’s In Cold Blood.

Daisy Jones And The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

“You have these lines you won’t cross. But then you cross them. And suddenly you possess the very dangerous information that you can break the rule and the world won’t instantly come to an end. You’ve taken a big, black, bold line and you’ve made it a little bit gray. And now every time you cross it again, it just gets grayer and grayer until one day you look around and you think, There was a line here once, I think.”

So what’s it about? Loosely inspired by the recording of Fleetwood Mac’s seminal Rumours album, this book tells the story of Daisy Jones, a ‘wild child’ of 70s LA who also happens to be a great singer. She drifts into a singing career and ends up joining the band The Six and making one of the best albums in rock history before everything implodes. Told in the style of a VH1 oral history documentary, through interviews with the characters and various other documents, the premise is that there’s a documentary about the band currently being researched, which allows Jenkins Reid to skip between the 70s and the present day, where we see the now much older characters reminiscing about their musical heyday.

What’s great about it? I love the structure of this book; it’s a difficult style to pull off as it could easily have felt disjointed and bitty, but Jenkins Reid manages to make it compulsively entertaining and really brings all the characters to life as we witness all the drama and turmoil of the LA music scene in the 1970s. It features lots of brilliant fashion and while Daisy and her relationship with bandmate Billy are the primary threads of the story, there are subplots around the other band members and Billy’s wife Camila which flesh out the picture and make it much more rounded and enjoyable.

Give it a try if: you love great music, especially seventies rock; you love strong but flawed female characters; you love books with unusual formats; you like watching music documentaries; you love rock n’ roll; you love books with some glitz and glamour.

The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman

“We stood and watched as God abandoned us, and then we did the best we could.”

So what’s it about? This is a fictionalised account of the siege of Masada, where in 70-73CE Roman forces besieged the moutaintop fortress of Masada and the 900 or so Jews who had fled there from elsewhere in Judea, including many who had left Jerusalem after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple. The story is told through the lives of four women - Yael, Shirah, Revka and Aziza - who have been assigned to care for the doves of the settlement. Each woman has ended up in Masada through a convoluted and often tragic set of circumstances and throughout the novel and the years of the siege we see them living in extraordinary circumstances, until the Romans finally breach Masada’s defences. Will the women take part in the suicide pact that the rebels have sworn? Or will they live to tell their tale?

What’s great about it? The siege of Masada, while obviously well-known, doesn’t feature in a great deal of popular culture and so this account makes for fascinating reading. What could compel so many people to choose death at their own hands, rather than surrendering to the Romans? How did they manage to live in a relatively small space under a besiegement that lasted three whole years? What were the lives of Jewish people like under the Romans? Hoffman is great at characterisation and each of the women, and their individual stories, provide a rich historical context and really help to transport the reader to the era while rooting for the women to survive. There is a touch of magic throughout the novel although it’s handled in such a way that it reads as something which people of that time very likely believed in rather than as a fantasy novel like some of Hoffman’s other work. Considering that we already know most of the ending, albeit not the crucial question of whether our lead characters survive, it’s notable that Hoffman manages to keep the suspense going all the way through, although perhaps that’s heightened by the fact that we know how dreadful the end of the story is.

Give it a try if: you love books set in Roman or Biblical times; you love strong female characters; you can deal with reading about tragedy; you love books which explore what it is to be human; you like trying to understand the lives of people in earlier eras; you’re fascinated by stories of people who live in extraordinary circumstances.

Clan Of The Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel

“It wasn’t exultation she felt, not the excitement of a first kill or even the satisfaction of overcoming a powerful beast. It was something deeper, more humbling. It was the knowledge that she had overcome herself.”

So what’s it about? Forget historical fiction and transport yourself all the way back to prehistory with Jean M. Auel’s Earth’s Children series, set more than 30,000 years ago when Neanderthals are dying out and modern humans are taking over. In this, the first book of the series, Ayla is a five year old human child who has been orphaned and left homeless by an earthquake. She is eventually found and adopted into a Neanderthal clan, where she treads a fine line between acceptance and rejection, never quite fitting in. Over the years, she begins to learn medicine and healing from the clan’s healer, until dramatic circumstances force her to leave in search of her own people.

What’s great about it? This is the first in a series of six books, each full of fascinating details inspired by the archeological record. Auel performs quite a feat of imagination in bringing the era to life so convincingly, especially given that there’s no written record from the time. The books aren't perfect: Ayla becomes a sort of totem for early humans; she’s the first human to domesticate both a wolf and a horse and there are quite a lot of graphic sex scenes which I didn’t love, but Ayla is a great character and Auel is a brilliant storyteller. The way that Auel has brought this era to life is astonishing and such a joy to read about. While the first book concentrates on Ayla’s childhood and early adulthood, as the series progresses we see Ayla and her eventual partner travelling great distances to southern France, to the location of the famous cave paintings of Lascaux.

Give it a try if: you love being transported to a completely different time and place; you’re interested in archaeology; you’ve seen the cave paintings of ancient times and wondered about the lives of the people who made them; you love truly imaginative books; you don’t mind graphic sex scenes; you’ve ever had a DNA test result which tells you you’ve got lots of Neanderthal DNA (perhaps that last one is just me).

The Camomile Lawn by Mary Wesley

“We all lived intensely. We did things we would never have done otherwise. It was a very happy time.”

So what’s it about? It’s the late 1930s in Cornwall, England, and five cousins are gathered on the camomile lawn of their aunt and uncle’s house. Over the course of World War II they will all change and grow and their lives will be completely different by the time the war is finished. Many years later, they are reunited back at the house for a funeral, and we see how the younger generations of the family have been affected by their parents’ lives.

What’s great about it? This is a really refreshing take on a WWII story because there’s no sentimentalism at in the novel and none of the characters are heroes; rather, they are all normal, flawed people doing the best they can while the world implodes around them, often behaving badly or impetuously and making assumptions about each other. Wesley is brilliant at characterisation and while the cousins (and indeed the rest of the characters) don’t always behave well or particularly likeably, the reader is always able to understand why any given character is doing whatever it is they’re choosing to do. The book is an astute social commentary although that’s not all it is; one character in particular has a coming of age arc and Wesley is especially effective when exploring the morality of relationships.

Wesley lived through the war as a young woman herself which of course suggests that her experience of the war is reflected in the book, which to me is fascinating as she shows us a side of the war which we rarely hear about, where people live with an intensity and vivacity which they’re then unable to find during peacetime.

Give it a try if: you love books that are set during WWII; you prefer books to be unsentimental; you like reading about complex, sometimes unlikeable characters; you like books that explore the morals of relationships; you like books which provide social commentary; you enjoy stories which have a coming of age aspect.

Thanks for reading!

I hope you found something good to read here. As ever, I’d love to hear if you’ve read and loved (or indeed hated) any of the books here, and which ones you’d add to the list. You can reply directly to this email or leave a comment by clicking the button below.