The Penguin Podcast: Episode 7 – Historical Fiction with Jodi Picoult

Join us as we time-travel through our bookshelves as we recommend must-read historical fiction in answer to your reading requests. Plus, bestselling author Jodi Picoult shares her theory on the true author behind Shakespeare's plays that inspired her new novel, By Any Other Name.

Click the button below to listen or keep scrolling to explore all of the books mentioned in this episode.

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Episode 7: Transcript

Rhianna Dhillon:

Hi book lovers. Before we dive into today's episode, we've got something special to share with you. Are you passionate about books and you want to have your voice heard by publishers at Penguin? We're excited to introduce you to the Bookmarks panel, a unique opportunity for readers like you to share your thoughts and insights directly with the people who create the books that you love. By joining our panel, you'll get the chance to participate in surveys, discussion groups, and find out as well as share feedback about upcoming titles before they're released. And then as a thank you, we run regular prize draws as well as the opportunity to earn points, points that turn into prizes. It's basically a win-win for any book enthusiast. So if you're eager to make a difference and influence the next bestseller, head over to the link in the description and sign up today. It's quick, it's really easy, and your feedback will help shape the stories of tomorrow.

Hello, I'm Rihanna Dillon. Welcome back to the Penguin Podcast and another episode of Ask Penguin. I'm in our podcast studio absolutely surrounded by beautiful books, and I'm poised to talk to some of the people who write and publish them. If you've got a question about anything book related and you'd like to get involved, it's really easy to get in touch. You can email us at Penguinpodcast@penguinrandomhouse.co.uk or just click the link in the show notes and we'll be putting some of your questions to a Penguin colleague a little later on. Today, we are going to scratch the surface of one of my very favourite genres as we take a spin through time to talk about all things historical fiction, filling your reading pile with page turning reads. From re-imagined conversations with historical figures to bringing major world events to life for today's readers, historical fiction can be a way into big complex ideas and globe-spanning stories. But with all of history to choose from, where do we even begin?

Our team have been time travelling through penguin's bookshelves to select the perfect books for your requests. But first, I'm joined by an author who is one of the most influential and prolific novelists working today. She's written dozens of bestselling novels, including My Sister's Keeper and Small Great Things, selling nearly 40 million copies worldwide, translated into 34 languages, and her work has been adapted for screen and for stage. She's the recipient of many awards, including a lifetime achievement award for mainstream fiction from the romance writers of America. Her latest work is a dazzling historical novel by any other name, which tells us the stories of two women centuries apart, one of whom is the real author of Shakespeare's plays, and both of whom are forced to hide behind another name to make their voices heard. So with us all the way from New Hampshire, I am delighted to welcome Jodi Picoult. Jodi, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us. Of course. I know you're incredibly busy at the moment. How are you doing?

Jodi Picoult:

I'm good. I'm doing really well.

Rhianna Dhillon:

Good. And you look fabulous and you are matching you book!

Jodi Picoult:

I'm matching my cover!

Rhianna Dhillon:

Which is stunning. That's the first time that's happened and congratulations on By Any Other Name. It's been a massive success. Tell us about the kind of fascination that we have with this particular period. I mean, I'd call it Shakespearean, but that's kind of a point that you are, it's contentious. Yeah, exactly.

Jodi Picoult:

So by any other name is really a book about how women have been written out of history by the men who were writing it. It follows two women in particular, one in 1581 named Amelia Besano, who is a real life historical figure. And she was a female playwright whose work couldn't go in front of the public because she was an Elizabethan female playwright. So I believe she paid someone for the use of their name. And I think that name was William Shakespeare.

It's also about her fictional descendant, Molina Green, who is also a female playwright in 2024, who's written a play about her ancestor but can't get any traction on Broadway because that is also a very male dominated world. And the question is whether she too is going to write herself out of history. I think that for me, the Shakespeare love came early, like everybody else I studied Shakespeare in middle school, high school, and then I went to college and I was an English major and I in particular fell in love with the language of the plays and the incredible three dimensional female characters that were created in those plays.

Portia, Rosalyn, Beatrice, Kate, nobody was writing women like that back then. There has always been a question about Shakespeare's authorship, and when I first heard about that and I was a student, I dismissed it because who else but Shakespeare would write his place? And I didn't really think about it until years later when I read an article in The Atlantic by a woman named Elizabeth Winkler, and she stated a fact that absolutely floored me, which is that Shakespeare had two daughters who survived infancy and he taught neither of them to read or write. They signed with a mark. And I was like, oh, oh, no, no, no, no, no. The same person who created those incredible female characters would absolutely have taught their own children how to read and write. And I wound up doing a deep dive into Amelia Besano, who I'd never heard of until I read that article. And so many of the gaps in Shakespeare's life that scholars have tried to twist themselves into knots to explain away reasons that with a lack of education or opportunity or travel experience or any experience, he might've been able to write certain plays in certain subjects. Amelia's life seamlessly seemed to fit into them.

And I think that the reason that Shakespeare has been so timeless is twofold. The actual work that we attribute to Shakespeare is beautiful, but it also, I think hand in hand with that is the fact that we have elevated Shakespeare to the level of a mythological creature. He is no longer just a playwright or potential playwright from Stratford. He has become a religion. And I actually think that is one of the reasons that we continue to teach the Bard that we say he is the greatest playwright of all time. It's all fed into this mythology that this one man was the only playwright in Elizabeth in England who never collaborated. He didn't have to, he was the only playwright whose copies were always fair, never foul, never made a mistake. Obviously those are embellishments. And yet somehow we've been drinking this Kool-Aid for 400 years.

Rhianna Dhillon:

Because what I love is I love Kit Marlow. I love Kit Marlow, but I also love Kit Marlow in your work as well. He is. He's a naughty man.

Jodi Picoult:

Right! Yeah, I do too. I mean, if you were going to pal around with a playwright in Elizabethan times, it would not be Shakespeare. It would definitely be Kit.

Rhianna Dhillon:

Yeah. So tell us about that then of kind of broadening out the world of Amelia and the people that she met who were kind of real and how much you wanted to write them as you wanted to see them as much as you knew about them.

Jodi Picoult:

Sure. Well, let me give you the facts that we know about Amelia first because the thing about writing Elizabethan, the historical fiction is that there are very few primary sources and we're all working from the same ones. And in Amelia's case, everything we know about her life comes almost exclusively from one document, which was a diary by a man named Simon Foreman. He was an astrologer slash hack doctor that she went to when she had a bunch of miscarriages and wanted to have another baby. And he chronicled every session that they had very meticulously, including how he tried to sleep with her multiple times and she refused him. And his diary is now in the Ashmolean so anyone can go and study it if they want to. So from this work, what we know in her own words is that her family came from a town called Besano del Grpa, Italy.

They were remarkable musicians. They played the recorder, Henry VIII came over, heard them and was like, must bring them back. They must be the recorder concert to the king. So he brings a bunch of Assano back to England, and they also then became Queen Elizabeth's recorder concert when Henry died. They were Jews and they couldn't be Jews in England. So they all hid their faith. They were kind of hidden Jews. When Amelia's seven years old, her dad dies, her mom leaves and she winds up becoming the ward of the Countess of Kent, who truly is the, in Amelia's life, she's like the most valuable player because she did something extraordinary and gave Amelia a full legal and classical education, which would've been remarkable for a noble daughter, much less some commoner's girl. But it definitely sparked Amelia's brain. When she was 12 years old, the Countess got remarried and moved to the Netherlands and Amelia couldn't go with her. So she was kind of in limbo for a season. And she wound up living with the Countess of Kent's brother, a man named Peregrine Bardie who was the ambassador to Denmark for Queen Elizabeth. We know historically that that summer when she was living with him, he did indeed go to Denmark. He met the king and queen of Denmark. He had dinner with Tycho Brahe, very famous astronomer whose supernova is the first scene in Hamlet when everyone's looking at a star.

And also Tycho Brahe relatives. His cousins were at dinner and they just happened to be named Rosen Krantz and Gilden Stern. It is worth pointing out again at this moment that Shakespeare never went to Denmark, ever. So that's when Amelia's 12, when she's 13, she is given to the Lord Chamberlain of England to become his mistress. He's 56 years old, which is super creepy to us, but pretty common back then.

And he was in charge of all theatre in England. So every play that was written crossed his desk and had to be censored for treason. He would've known the playwrights, the actors, the theatre owners, the producers. And for the 10 years that Amelia lived with him, she would've known them too and gone to rehearsals and gone to opening nights, all the things when Amelia's 23, she gets pregnant, you can't be a pregnant mistress. So she is booted out of Somerset house and married off to her cousin, this terrible guy named Alfonso Lanier, who squanderers all the money that's been settled to keep her comfortable for life. So now they're totally broke. She has a baby, she has a husband, she hates, and we know she needs to keep her family afloat, but we don't know what happens for 20 years. And then suddenly she becomes the first published female poet ever in all of England. Huge achievement, right? Something you should all know her name for and nobody ever does. And when you're in your forties, especially as a woman back then, you don't just start writing and get published. And that's why I really believe that she was writing earlier and was using somebody else's name. So in my case, I have all of these, what I call high water marks. These are the actual facts of Amelia's life. And my job as the novelist was to bridge the gap between them.

And I started to think about how a girl who studied poetry with the Countess of Kent might have made her way into playwriting after seeing it done when living with Lord Hunston, the Lord Chamberlain. And that was when I came up with Kit Marlowe. So a lot of people have made connections between Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe because people feel that the portrait of Shylock, which is a very three dimensional character of a Jew in Merchant of Venice, is a direct response to the more black and white evilly drawn Jew of Malta in Christopher Marlowe's play. There is no proof that Marlowe and Shakespeare ever met, but I thought for sure Amelia would've met him because he absolutely would've known the Lord Chamberlain. So I thought, wouldn't it be interesting if they became good friends. Also, I just thought he was such a fun character.

He really was. He was irreverent. He was always pushing the envelope. There was so much mystery surrounding him. People believe that he might've been a spy. He was just a really cool character. And I decided that he was going to become Amelia's BFF and sort of mentor her as she becomes a playwright. There's also a real play called Arden of Faversham, and it was published anonymously. So it's been attributed to Marlo, to Shakespeare to just about every writer of the time. But female Elizabethan scholars all said to me when I interviewed them independently, I've always believed a woman wrote that.

Rhianna Dhillon:

Really?

Jodi Picoult:

Because it's a true crime story about a woman who hires someone to kill her husband so she can run off with her lover and then they bungle the job, so she has to do it herself. And Alice of Arden, who is the character, the main character, has the best speeches, very richly drawn speeches. And so for that reason, they believed it was a woman. And I thought, okay, great. It's going to be Amelia in my book. But I wanted Kit to work with her on it almost as a mentor to give her that playwriting background. And it would make sense that if he helps her get that to be published, if he carries it to a theatre company and says, you should perform this, that could happen one time. But he can't keep bringing anonymous things because he has a name already, and that is why he is the one to encourage her to talk to this guy William Shakespeare, because he knows other people also are paying for the use of his name. And that was a very common thing back then writing under a pseudonym or an anonym, which is a pseudonym for someone who's still alive basically of a real person. That was very common in Elizabeth at times. We have lots of proof of that.

I personally do not think Amelia wrote all the Shakespearean plays. I think that there was a collective of writers. I think the Earl of Oxford was probably the ringleader. I like to think about it like the way James Patterson now has a whole stable full of authors writing his books for him. And I think that Amelia was one of those writers, and I think she was also one of several women, and that is something that has not been brought up before. When we start talking about the authorship controversy in Shakespeare, people get very cranky when you suggest that a woman might've been the one to write the plays.

Rhianna Dhillon:

So throughout your career, you have spoken a lot about gender discrimination, especially in the arts, and it is, as you said, a book about two women almost being written out of history by men. And as a female storyteller, can you talk about how your own experience shaped this story and why you wanted to tell this one?

Jodi Picoult:

Yeah. When I started to dive into Amelia's life, I realised her story was one of gender discrimination in writing. And like you said, that's something I've been very vocal about. And it wasn't a matter of like, am I going to write this? It was, how can I not write it? It just fell into my lap and felt right. I also, I've been saying for a while, this is truly the book of my heart. I think this is the book that I was meant to write, and I think it's because it is about something that I experience on a daily basis, even with the success that I have had as an author. And even with the number of years I've been doing this, 30 something years, I am still judged differently than a male writer is in so many ways. I was just on book tour in America and you're on a flight every single day and you sit next to someone and they say, what do you do? And I say, I'm a writer. What do you write? Usually it's a guy, and usually they look at me and they say, oh, you write children's books. And I say, no, you write romance, no women's fiction.

Why do they just let you answer? What is women's fiction? Well, because they're men, they don't let me answer. So to me, the fact that we're still pigeonholing female writers in a way that we don't with men

That really astounds me. I don't even know what women's fiction really is. Why do we expect only women to read a certain kind of fiction? And yet men aren't expected to read? I don't know. I guess books about domestic things, that makes no sense to me. I was talking last night with Jojo Moyes at an event, and we were saying that we have all been asked questions as female writers that men never get asked like, you have three kids and you've published all these books. How do you do it? Nobody ever asks a man that.

Rhianna Dhillon:

Yeah, it's gross.

Jodi Picoult:

Because the assumption is that for them, writing is a job and for women, writing is a choice.

Rhianna Dhillon:

I mean, it's absolutely infuriating to hear that's still going on.

I want to talk about Melina as well, male Green because in the present day she has a story which has echoes of Amelia's. Obviously it's updated, but how did you decide to draw on a similar arc without it feeling repetitive and bringing in even more issues and understanding of what discrimination looks like in 2024?

Jodi Picoult:

It was really important to me that this not be just historical fiction. And that's because I think when people read historical fiction, there is a tendency to say, oh, well, but that was the past. Things are different now. And I really wanted to point out that although things have changed for women in 400 years, a lot has not. And Molina's story really allows me to do that. It's set in the world of theatre just like Amelia's is. That's something I have personal experience because for the past 10 years, I've been writing for the Broadway world writing librettos for musicals. When Molina tries to get her play somewhere to a theatre, she has trouble because it's a girl's coming of age story. The first musical that I adapted actually came from a novel that I wrote called Between the Lines, and it was the Young Girls Coming of Age story and everything Molina is told in this book, I was told to my face about our musical, it's too small, it's too emotional. Nobody wants to see a girl coming of age on Broadway. And I was told this at the time that two boys coming of age musicals were playing next door to each other. And when you know that 80% of Broadway tickets are purchased by women.

Where's the disconnect? Right? And the disconnect is in the gatekeepers of Broadway who are literally all a group of old white men, just a handful of them, and they tend to decide what they want to put on their stages and they pick things that look like their own experience

When in reality there are audiences that want to see brown stories and black stories and queer stories and stories of people with disabilities and women's stories. And we have not reached that level of parody yet at all. The other thing that I was interested in in Molina's story is I wanted to put all the Shakespearean tropes into the modern section. I thought that would be really fun. So you have mistaken identity, you have a woman who has to dress as a man, you have miscommunication that totally screws up the plot and all that was really, really fun to achieve. But there is this kind of a serious sort of vein running through Molina's story, which is about racism and allyship as well. Molina's best friend is a man named Andre, who like her was a wannabe playwright. And because he's a black gay man, he too has trouble getting his work noticed. But instead of putting himself out there over and over to be rejected, he's chosen to hide himself by working at a casting agency and saying, well, I'm too busy to write my plays. And then when Molina winds up wanting to submit a play to a festival and realises that an artistic director who is particularly misogynistic is running and making the decisions for this festival, she says, no, I'm not going to do it. And Andre, who happens to be drunk at the time, mistakenly submits, not mistakenly, intentionally submits her play,

Rhianna Dhillon:

Then forgets.

Jodi Picoult:

Right then forgets it, but changes her name so that it is an androgynous name. And then what ensues is all of Molina's story is she tries to figure out how can you go about advocating for yourself as someone who is within a marginalised group, but still also want to celebrate the wins of the other marginalised groups that maybe are a little further than you are in the process? That's a really, really hard line to toe, and it's something I have yet to see in any other work of fiction. So it was really for me, new and fresh and fun to write about.

Rhianna Dhillon:

Before we kind of wrap up, I just wanted to ask you, there are so many different kinds of love that we see in this book, and I mean even in moments where you think that Amelia on paper should be so angry or resentful, actually, she finds a certain love there like with Hundston. She appreciates him, and we kind see that then scattered throughout the love between Andre and Melina Melina and how that is challenged. So how did you want to address these different forms of love throughout?

Jodi Picoult:

I think that there's friendship, there's romantic love, there's sexual love, there's the love you have for a child. All of those I think are represented in very different ways. What I think is interesting is when you take a text that you think like a sonnet that you are sure is about the loss of a romantic love and you put a spin on it instead, so maybe it's about the loss of a child, you will never read that song the same way again. And that again is a reason that I think points to the fact that perhaps it wasn't Shakespeare writing all these poems and plays. I think that the thing that is rising to my head right now is the line that Amelia has when she's actually talking towards the end of her life to the Earl of Southampton, who I believe she had a relationship with, a sexual relationship with. And she says to him, you are the only thing that I ever chose for myself. And I think that as a woman, particularly back then who did not have a lot of options, who was boxed in by society, those very small choices can be very fierce. And they are the connections that you choose to make between people

Rhianna Dhillon:

Because obviously within, Melina faces a lot of aggression at certain points in her career. And also, I guess just generally, like you said, even positing the idea that Shakespeare didn't write his own work. What's been your experience of telling this story from this perspective. With modern day readers?

Jodi Picoult:

I mean, look, I was in Stratford and I made it out alive.

Rhianna Dhillon:

Wow. You must've been very convincing then

Jodi Picoult:

I like to think I was. When you take on a titan like Shakespeare, there is a group of people for whom that is very problematic. And I get it. When you have spent your entire life studying Shakespeare and someone comes up and says, I don't think he wrote his plays. It sort of demeans the value of your own life, right? Because you study this all this time, I have had pushback from fussy old guys who are telling me that, of course I'm a crackpot and I'm a conspiracy theorist. I don't think I am. But ultimately, I don't want to tell you don't believe in Shakespeare.

I'm going to do in my book what I do in all my other books, I'm going to lay out all the facts. I'm going to let you read it, and then I'm going to let you say, is this coincidence or does this all have to add up to something? Moreover, nobody loves this language and these plays more than I do. I truly love them. For 400 years, we have been looking from one angle at these plays and saying, this is the way it was. And all I'm asking you to do is to walk over there and look at it from a different angle and just see if anything catches the light. It doesn't take away at all from the plays, from the body of work that we all revere, but if we've spent 400 years not giving credit where it's due, isn't it time?

Rhianna Dhillon:

Jodi Picoult, thank you so much for joining us by any other names available now we're all good bookshops, along with Jody's, many other titles.

You are listening to Ask Penguin, the new podcast from Penguin Books. And today we are talking about one of our most popular genres that our readers and listeners request. It's historical fiction and to help us with some recommendations and answer your brilliant ask Penguin questions. I'm joined today by one of Penguin's publishers, Jill Taylor. Hi, Jill.

Jill Taylor:

Oh, it's so nice to be here. Thank you for having me.

Rhianna Dhillon:

Thank you so much for coming.

Jill Taylor:

Feel like I don't have the best voice and you have an amazing podcast voice. I'm mesmerised

Rhianna Dhillon:

I'll take that. Thank you so much. Jill, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about the authors and the books that you work with that you publish and you are part of an imprint as well. I've learned what an imprint is recently.

Jill Taylor:

I mean, I still don't know all of the imprints across the publishing industry, but Penguin has a good number of them. And I work for an imprint called Michael Joseph, and we do fiction and nonfiction, and I work across both, which is a little bit unusual actually, to have a publisher who kind of switches hats. And it means my year is sometimes very busy in the autumn with Christmas hardbacks and a lot of nonfiction. And often the spring is all about brilliant novels and debuts, and so it's a really exciting rhythm.

Rhianna Dhillon:

That's so interesting. I'd never thought about books having seasons before. So as you mentioned, you publish a lot of historical fiction titles.

Jill Taylor:

I love it. I really do love it.

Rhianna Dhillon:

And is there one particular period that you are like, oh my God, they're talking about this. This is my favourite period, this is what I love.

Jill Taylor:

Well, I was medievals before I got into publishing. And so there is something about the desolate, the idea that the only kind of big grand architecture around England are these extraordinary cathedrals and the idea of different conquering tribes coming in. I love really brilliantly expressed battle scenes. And so I am lucky enough to work with Conn Iggulden who's a very, very brilliant evocateur of battle scenes. I don't think that's actually a word guys.

Rhianna Dhillon:

That's a beautiful word.

Jill Taylor:

But something like the Battle of Malden, which has, to me, they're the equivalent of kind of Lord of the Ring speeches where you are the sea of soldiers in front of you and you've got your kind of moment to take a breath before battle begins. And there's something about those emotions being expressed on the page, which has always captured me in whatever walk of life I've been in. And so I think Mediaeval England really is a fascinating time. And then also I'm really loving my kind of Roman worlds at the moment, and I'm working, Conn, his most recent book is about Nero, and actually I'm fascinated by Nero's mother Araina who I think is a very lesser known figure within history. She kept diaries, and for me, it's like a library of Alexandria. There are certain periods of history where I think, oh, if we had records of them or someone's diary, I just would lock myself in a room and not emerge for a year in order to read them. And so it's moments like that in history which I find very fascinating.

Rhianna Dhillon:

You are so perfect for our Ask Penguin question today. So our first one, let's get stuck in our first one is, can you recommend any historical fiction with a slightly supernatural element? This person really enjoyed the warm hands of ghosts by Catherine Arden.

Jill Taylor:

Well, I also enjoyed the warm hands of ghosts. And actually what I was so impressed by in Catherine's novel is the way that she had clearly done this incredible research around passion Dale. And I love how she infuses that background into her novel and creates this incredibly chilling, compelling read. And so I'm going to also recommend something that takes place in a kind of very isolated and a very kind of isolating experience, and I think a part of the world that not a lot of people might read fiction and historical fiction within. And that's Iceland. And the novel that I'm going to recommend is called The Glass Woman by Caroline Lee. And it's set in 17th century Iceland. And why I'm fascinated by this time is that the rest of the world had basically kind of become Christian, and that was driving a kind of lack of supernatural, or we'd kind of left that behind.

And Iceland is fascinating to me because actually it's still a very supernatural culture, and the idea of witches and witchcraft is kind of infused in the everyday. And you have these small, very isolated communities who really have magic at the heart of them. And the glass woman takes place, it has a heroine named Rosa, and she's very kind of modern to us in the sense that she's very clever. She's slightly being thrust into a marriage that she doesn't want because it's the only option in front of her. And she's taken out of her own community and kind of put in the middle of a very suspicious one. And she's married a man. She doesn't know he's wealthy and he's very well to do and kind of respected, but also she very clearly starts to sense that something is amiss. His first wife has died under mysterious circumstances.

Everyone seems to, and have been whispering about them. Very, very strange things are happening in the house, and she's starting to doubt her own mind and her own kind of sanity and the way that it's woven in with the history of sagas and witchcraft and the kind of what happens when a community has to accept an outsider, and what that outsider has to realise about themselves and the people around them in order to understand that community is a fascinating read. But also this is one where you will literally read with your hands over your mouth not knowing what's going to happen. If it was a movie, you'd have to hide behind the sofa because it's really freaky. There's elements of Jane Eyre, the Blue blood fairytales, and it's just, there's something in the attic, and I won't give it away, but I promise you'll scream. If you make it to page 121, you will throw the book across the room.

Rhianna Dhillon:

I love that you've actually got the page number as well. And it also sounds quite Daphne du Maurier

Jill Taylor:

Definitely, it's got a gothic edge. It's got that supernatural edge. And actually it's very clever as a novel because it doesn't let you in on the secret before the characters in the novel realise them. And so it's a different kind of read that way because the impulse to kind of read ahead to the end and find the twist, don't do it because it's so worth it to let it unravel. But oh gosh, it's so good. I love this novel.

Rhianna Dhillon:

See, even like you talking about it has made my pulse go up a little bit, so I feel like this is going to be perfect for me.

Jill Taylor:

You say sagas, you say witchcraft, you say Iceland, you say a kind of isolated woman who knows something going on around her, like you're there.

Rhianna Dhillon:

Sounds so good. Okay, another one. Another one. We've got somebody looking for historical fiction with mystery or thriller elements.

Jill Taylor:

Okay, I'm going to stick with the ladies and I'm going to recommend Elizabeth Fremantle's firebrand, which might be on your radar because it's just been released in cinemas. And at the end of the month it's going to come to the streaming on Amazon. And I think it got the most noise online because the wonderful Jude Law put on a fair amount of weight and also I think didn't bathe and managed to put together a perfume to evoke the smells of the time, which meant that everyone else in the room was gagging around him. And actually what this story is for anyone who doesn't know, it's the story of Catherine Parr, who was the final wife of Henry and the one who survived him. And what is interesting to me, and I'm going to say this in a classic publisher way, read the book first because the book and the film are actually quite different. And the novel takes you into Catherine's mindset. This is an incredibly dangerous time to be a dissident, to be a woman who has different beliefs and also kind of to be married to Henry VIII. And what is always in the back of Catherine's mind is what's happened to the women who have preceded her.

And there's this kind of cat and mouse atmosphere to the novel where you kind of think at every or any given moment, she's going to misstep and it's going to result in the loss of her head. And it's told from three different perspectives. It's told from Catherine's perspective, from the maid's perspective, and from Henry's doctor's perspective, and it's very cleverly done because you are never quite sure who the allies are and who's working for you or who's secretly going to work against you in order to save their own neck. And so it makes for, it's a kind of proper thriller of a read. Even if you know your history and that Catherine does eventually outlive Henry, you get so enraptured into the novel that you start to second guess your own knowledge of history because it is so tense and it's so unclear how she's going to get out of this very dangerous situation.

Rhianna Dhillon:

That sounds like a really impressive feat to be able to make you question yourself. Okay, we have another Ask Penguin, can you recommend some exciting historical fiction with adventure at its heart, which I love?

Jill Taylor:

I'm going to recommend two. And the first is one of my all time favourite novels, which is The Count of Monte Cristo. Oh yes. Which is fascinating to me as a novel because it was written originally for serialisation, and so it's actually quite baggy in the read. And I'll never forget, Umberto Ecco wrote an amazing article about he was trying to retell it and he was going to trim the fat basically and make it into a very kind of contained, tighter novel. And it thwarted him because actually it is so moorish in the adventure and because it was serialised in a way that we think of Dickens or something or your favourite telenovella or soap opera, every single beat ends on a cliffhanger. And then you start a new cliffhanger and it slightly might contradict what's come before. It might bring in entirely new characters that you don't even know who they are, but it's one kind of rollicking, good moment after another, but tied up with really dark human emotions and asking kind of really important questions about what value you place on your own soul and whether or not vengeance is ever the right way to kind of live your life.

And there are certain lines within it that I think are the most kind of cracking love storylines, and there's kind of mis-identities. There's this saving of a son at the last minute, which kind of brings a couple of characters together. It's such a clever novel. I love it. I would highly recommend it. And also, it's one that I'm going to do a shout out for the audio book because such a good kind of listen while you're doing the dishes or before you go to bed and almost listen to it as it was serialised. But that's a hot tip. And the second one I'm going to recommend is I think a name that we'll be familiar to everyone else, which is Robert Harris.

And it is a novel, I think it was his last, his previous novel to the one that's out at the moment called Acts of Oblivion. And I just think this is a completely riveting read, and it follows one of the greatest manhunts in history, which is men who were responsible for the death of King Charles the first, and they didn't enact it themselves. There're two of the 59 people who signed Charles's death warrant. But basically what happens after Charles, the second is restored to the throne, is that there is a hunt for those of the gentlemen who signed this death warrant who are still alive to bring them back and punish them. And it is this kind of incredible adventure between England and America. And what is clever about it is it told from different perspectives. One of the perspectives is from the man who's actually on this manhunt, and he's been sent by Charles II and a committee in order to find the two men responsible for this crime.

And so you are in his perspective and everything that he knows and what his clues are and what he's searching for and what it means to him and the responsibility he has. But then you're also in the headspace of the two men who have been on the run and you see the lives that they've built up for themselves. You see their kind of guilt or lack of guilt over what they've done. You see the kind of homesickness for their homeland. And it's a really complicated read in terms of who you are rooting for to kind of win out, which is I think one of the best parts of adventure novel. Is that actually the adventurous part of it, but it's what that adventure does to the characters along the way.

Rhianna Dhillon:

The impact of the journey. Well, if you're a fan of Robert Harris, you should listen to last week's episode because we had him on talking all about Conclave and Precipice. So please go and listen back to that. He was a brilliant interviewee.

Jill Taylor:

He's so erudite, and he wears his research very lightly. And I think I always feel in a read that he's had a lot of fun with his characters and he's really enjoyed putting them in various predicaments.

Rhianna Dhillon:

Final one, Jill, this Ask Penguin is asking for a queer historical novel set in the 19 hundreds with a bit of romance in it.

Jill Taylor:

That's not a big ask, but that's a lot of an ask if we can say, because there are so many amazing novels set in the 19 hundreds, which kind of cover those themes of war and love and identity. But I would be surprised if this novel wasn't very familiar to listeners because it was Waterstone's novel of the year last year, and that is Alice Winn In Memoriam.

Which is kind of one of those books that comes along every so often that I think is a kind of defining book for a generation. And it somehow is summed up in a very modern, but kind of true to the identity, the first World War way, what it means to be in love with a best friend who doesn't realise you're in love with him, but also to have the additional barrier of the fact that you are in love with someone of your own sex. And that's not allowed. And I think what I find so spectacular about this novel, because there are many brilliant books that have told of the horrors of the First World war and the kind of psychological damage of what happened to the young men that were out there. And to see two very vulnerable men fall in love while they're kind of friends and colleagues are dying around them. And to see love come through the most disastrous and the most kind of horrific circumstances is just a kind of spine tingling read. I mean, it makes you think so differently and takes so cherish so much those that you love in your life now. And I think it's an incredibly special book, and I could not recommend it more highly. And then another, I going to give a shout out for a Penguin Classic by E.M. Forster which is called Maurice.

And it is a very particular novel of its time in the sense that it kind of has that linger of an Edwardian novel almost. But I find it fascinating that I think it was written around 19 45, 19 46, I think, but it wasn't able to be published until the 1970s. And that kind of tells you everything about the environment that Forster was writing into and actually our own attitudes and the idea of what we would and wouldn't accept on the page. And it's a novel, a young man who's a kind of an exceptional young man and living in a privileged life. He's gone through Cambridge and he has a real reckoning with what he wants his life to be and what he feels that he should be and what he is going to finally allow himself to be. And the kind of way it evokes a love story of not only oneself, but of another person is a really, really stunning read.

Rhianna Dhillon:

Amazing. I would also recommend My Policeman.

Jill Taylor:

Did see the movie with Harry Styles?

Rhianna Dhillon:

So my mum bought me the book years ago because it's set in Brighton where I'm from and grew up. And it was just such an incredibly special book and so much about love, but also betrayal and unrequited love and desperation. And then, yeah, the film with Harry Styles obviously got attention for kind of different, for a different reason, which I felt like it kind of lost something in the retelling. I thought the book was so incredibly special.

Jill Taylor:

I always think there's something about a betrayal on the page and the emotion of it, which is for me is probably why I'm in publishing and not trying to be in a film crew somewhere. But I think there are ways that you can heighten emotion on the page, which I don't respond to in the same way on film and the way that you can write the kind of tiny cuts of the heart, which are just haunting. And also on a very selfish level, the idea of being able to underline my favourite sentences in a book and transfer them. I have a very cheesy quote book where I put my favourite lines of books into.

Rhianna Dhillon:

That's very cool.

Jill Taylor:

And it feels then it's a part of you and you've somehow internalised the words. And I think that's why reading is so special.

Rhianna Dhillon:

Jill, this has been amazing. You've given us so many brilliant recommendations. Thank you. Such a great range as well.

Jill Taylor:

Isn't that the beauty of historical though, is that you can be reading about the ancient Greeks in one moment and then about the Cold War in another and kind of throwing yourselves into all sorts of different and adventures and spine-tingling moments and kind of always come back to what it means to be human and identify yourself or be fascinated by a completely different type of character.

Rhianna Dhillon:

And that there are no parameters there. You don't have to just be stuck in one or the other, the whole point of it is like time travel.

Jill Taylor:

Genre tastic.

Rhianna Dhillon:

No doubt we can nerd out about this for ages.

You can find out all of the details for all of the books that we've mentioned this week and across the series at penguin.co.uk/podcasts. I mean, we've covered heaps of different genres this series already, so I honestly think there's something there for very pickiest of readers. Why not drop us a line though and let us know what you are enjoying reading at the moment? Send us your thoughts and questions by emailing Penguin podcast@penguinrandomhouse.co uk or just click the link in the show notes and you can go straight to the podcast page. Thank you so much for listening, and thank you to our brilliant guests, Jill Taylor and Jodi Picoult. Happy reading.