Did everyone get their newsletter today? There is a great review of Bernard Cornwell's new book, Azincourt, and a few other books that sound like good reads. I am especially excited to hear about another new book about an explorer, and even more excited that this is an explorer I haven't already heard of or read about. Yay!

This is the explorer book, but there is no review. You know you are dying to read more books about explorers! ;-)

• 16th Century
  Crossing the Continent 1527-1540: The Story of the First African-
  American Explorer of the American South by Robert Goodwin, San
  Francisco Chronicle, 2 November 2008, Jesse Berrett

This sounds awfully interesting too -

• Lady Worsley's Whim: An Eighteenth Century Tale of Sex, Scandal and
  Divorce by Hallie Rubenhold, The Sunday Times, James Fergusson
  Hallie Rubenhold bills this as "one of the first celebrity divorce
  cases". It was certainly sensational. Sir Richard Worsley was
  comptroller of the King's household, an MP and governor of the Isle
  of Wight. His wife, co-heiress to the manor of Brompton (now site of
  the Victoria and Albert museum), was said to have taken 27 lovers -
  several of whom were called to court as witnesses.

Here's the review for Azincourt -

• Azincourt by Bernard Cornwell, The Telegraph, 6 November 2008, David
  Robson
  If Bernard Cornwell was born to write one book, this is it. No other
  historical novelist has acquired such a mastery of the minutiae of
  warfare in centuries past. No one else could hope to take
  Shakespeare's Henry V, strip it of its rhetoric and tell the
  unvarnished truth about the Battle of Agincourt, which saw slaughter
  on a scale that shocked Christendom. Hook is an archetypal Cornwell
  hero, a brave, blunt, plain-speaking man, without airs of any kind.
  In an action-packed story, he kills a man, is outlawed, and rescues a
  novice French nun from being raped - and that is before the English
  army has even captured Harfleur. After that, the narrative proceeds
  on broadly predictable lines, climaxing at Agincourt, where Hook and
  his fellow archers - their skills with a longbow captured with
  peerless skill - help overturn seemingly insuperable odds.

I wasn't all that sure I'd be interested in Azincourt, but the review makes it sound awfully good.

Here is the review for Toni Morrison's newest book. It sounds great!

• A Mercy by Toni Morrison, The Independent, 7 November 2008, Andrea
  Stuart
  "To be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion
  over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to
  another is a wicked thing". This is the message of Toni Morrison's
  new novel; her ninth and one of her best. Set in the 1680s, the story
  centres on the household of Jacob Vaark, an Anglo-Dutch trader who
  has created a homestead in the harsh Northern territories. It is told
  from the perspective of the young women who have washed up there from
  other places: his mail-order bride Rebekka, who has endured the
  fearsome Atlantic crossing from England; Lina, a native American
  woman whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; Sorrow, the unhinged
  daughter of a sea captain; and Florens, a wild young black woman who
  Vaark, despite his distaste for dealing "in flesh", has taken on as
  payment for a bad debt.

2009 is looking like it will be a great year for Historical Fiction and History!

There's a society? I didn't know that!

What society? where? <looking around>  Can we join? how?

Is it historicalnovels .info? http://www.historicalnovels.info/index.html On second thought it think it's this one. ttp://www.historicalnovelsociety.org/hnr-online.htm I have several book links in my favorites.

I din't know there was a society either.  Hurray for Agincourt and English archers!!