Author: Susie Helme

Nadine Bjursten, Half a Cup of Sand and Sky, (Alder House Books 2023)

Amineh meets up with her friend Ava for a picnic in a Tehran park. Nearby, some students are protesting against the shah, and they can hear the police sirens approaching. One of their friends Tahmures has been murdered by the state. Soon, they, too, would have to risk everything for the freedom they desired. Some look to Ayatollah Khomeini for leadership; others, like Tahmures, to the politics of Karl Marx.

She meets Farzad, older than her but respected, at a memorial for Tahmures, and Ava likes his friend Dariush.
Five years earlier, her grandmother had died, and her cousin Qasem had taken over the family rose farm in Qamsar, but there was no life for her there, now. Amineh is writing a novel about her parents, yet she hardly remembers them—they died when she was eight—and everyone around her wants her to make it political.

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Christian Cameron, The Venetian Heretic, (Orion 2025)

Intrigue and Inquisators in 17th C Venice.

Richard Hughes, an English fencing master in Venice, a former soldier and galley slave, takes in students and accommodates a studious roommate Filippo. He teaches a woman, an opera singer of some fame.

A professor of philosophy has been murdered in Padua—a libertine. An innkeeper’s wife has gone missing, but why would the Holy Inquisition be looking for her? There are plots and intrigues and people chasing bad guys in gondolas led by a villain in a red mask. The ticking time bomb at the end is marvellous.

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Christine Jordan, Endurance, (Bloodhound Books 2024)

The story of the Jewish community in mediaeval Gloucester, based on real historic people
1216. Tzuri witnesses the coronation of young King Henry. The Jewish community of Gloucester hope the new regime will be kinder. His love, the draper’s daughter Vernisse, a Christian, finds him in the crowd and surreptitiously holds his hand.

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Tristan Hughes, Boundary Waters, (Parthian Books 2025)

Canada 1804, the wild frontier. Arthur journeys into the wild wilderness in a birchbark canoe, with a ‘parcel of scoundrels’ led by the erratic drunkard McLeod. There is a treasure—a lost cache of valuable furs—its riches to be won.
The tale is told to Esther, a Saulteaux woman he meets along the journey.

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Em Thompson, Murder on the Ordinary Express, (Eccentric Directions 2025)

This extremely funny novel features Thompson’s unique writing style and innovative vocabulary tricks. He turns other parts of speech into other parts of speech: ‘uncountitude’, ‘pedantic plodology’, ‘bloodredded moments’, ‘freshenupped’, ‘fastidious pernickityness’, ‘alimonious divorce’. She is ‘highly umbraged to have her probity impugned’. Any clichéd metaphor or pun you might find in here will be cleverly turned on its head and done something even cleverer with.

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S S Turner, The Last Toll Collector, (Fortis Publishing 2024)

Ex toll collector Valerie sets up an ‘independent nation’ in a herring factory in Iceland
After losing her job as toll collector on the Golden Gate Bridge to machines, Valerie Tobruk is at her 23rd job interview. AI was filling so many of the job opportunities nowadays.

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