Review copy provided by the publisher.
This is so good, and many of you will want to read it when it comes out.
What it is: a very close third-person POV story of the pretender to the throne of Henry VII best known to posterity as Lambert Simnel, who in his life had many other names. And it does such a good job of that tight perspective. It starts with him as a little boy on a farm, with the perspective on world history that a little boy on a 15th century farm would have, without making him twee or precious or stupid. What it does with his perspective moving through the tumultuous events of his life, with the fall of Richard III and the rise of Henry VII, the uprising for which he was the figurehead and its aftermath, is a development of intimate character voice as good as any I’ve ever seen, and with lots of eventful historical material rather than just interior ponderings.
In the hands of a lesser prose stylist and character observer, this could have been the kind of rote historical fiction you often find in the late 19th century: here is an historical figure, his life and times, hurrah, the end. But a really good writer has always been able to make a book of that pattern into something more, and Harkin does as well as, say, Naomi Mitchison at the job. Which is high praise indeed.