A Rip in the Veil

A Highland glen’s stories across centuries of saints, strangers, and secrets (Walter Scott Prize 2022).

A WWII nurse walks through standing stones into Jacobite Scotland—and a complicated love story.

Linked narratives of plague, prophecy, and Black life across centuries (SAH Prize 1997).

In October 1783 Ross Poldark comes back from the American war to Nampara in Cornwall and finds his father dead, the land derelict, and Elizabeth Chynoweth promised to his cousin Francis. Winston Graham’s 1945 novel is early-modern saga historical fiction of the years through 1787—a mine he fights to reopen, the bankers and gentry of Truro, and Demelza Carne, the miner’s daughter he takes in from a fair, who is his wife by the end of this first volume.

Stephen Wraysford’s prewar love affair in Amiens is swallowed by the Somme, the tunnels under the Western Front, and the unmaking of a generation. A later strand follows his granddaughter as she tries to recover what the Great War buried.

In the London Library, researcher Roland Michell finds unsigned drafts of a letter from the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, traces them to the poet Christabel LaMotte, and with Maud Bailey follows a correspondence from their secret affair that the academy has never seen. A. S. Byatt’s 1990 novel is Victorian time-slip historical fiction of that affair’s 1859 crisis, and of the late-1980s academics who cross London, Yorkshire, and Brittany to possess the proof.