Reviews for Rose

‘This is everything a good historical romance should be.’

‘I was fully immersed in my reading and bitterly disappointed when it ended.’

I loved everything about this book. With a cracking plot, wide in scope and yet exquisitely detailed, it conveys the world of England in the 1850s—domestic life, medicine, industry and charity—with a confident brush. McMahon also cleverly evokes the gulf between middle-class life in England and its perception of the situation which is at total odds with the reality. She also subtly draws out the similarities between the Crimean War and what is happening in Iraq now without any sense of the didactic. Her portrayal of Rosa and Mariella is particularly fine, as is they way they, and our perceptions of them, deepen and evolve as the novel progresses. I have enjoyed reading all Katherine McMahon’s historical novels but this, to me, is her best so far. I thoroughly recommend it.

McMahon is developing into a perceptive writer with a mind and imagination well attuned to the vagaries and complexities of lives lived in extraordinary times and under intense duress. Using Elizbeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman doctor,and John Keat's letters to his fiancee Fanny Brawne as her inspiration, this is a captivating and soul-searching novel in a class far above the norm in romantic fiction.

...and Katherine McMahon, whose The Rose of Sebastopol combines high romance with the horrors of the Crimean war; a heady mix bound to appeal to readers who enjoy the Club's traditional focus on historical fiction.