Elizabeth Speller: 6 books

One of the greatest--and most enigmatic--Roman emperors Hadrian stabilized the imperial borders established peace throughout the empire patronized the arts and built an architectural legacy that lasts to this day: the great villa at Tivoli the domed wonder of the Pantheon and the eponymous wall that...

In 1880, Ada Curtis bore Gerald Howard the first of several illegitimate children. Ada was a housemaid, the daughter of a Lincolnshire butcher. Gerald was her employer and the son of a once-grand family now obsessed with its own threadbare nobility. They thereby sent their descendants tumbling chaotically...

“Combines a Ruth Rendell–like psychological realism, an Agatha Christie–like plot and a Dickensian feel for life’s roulette . . . Pulse-pounding” (The Wall Street Journal). When Great War veteran Laurence Bartram arrives in Easton Deadall, he is struck by the beauty of the crumbling...

During World War I, four Allied soldiers experience the Battle of the Somme together in this “utterly gripping” historical novel (Booklist, starred review). On July 1, 1913, four very different men are leading four very different lives. Benedict is a British music student. Jean-Baptiste...

A man investigates the deaths of his fellow veterans in this “haunting and beautifully written” novel of post–World War I England (C. S. Harris, author of the Sebastian St. Cyr Mysteries). London, 1920. In the aftermath of the Great War and a devastating family tragedy, Laurence Bartram...

A powerful and mysterious love story—set in the divided city of Berlin in 1968—evoking the post-war themes of loss, identity, and betrayal. The city is melting in summer heat when Lucy Masterson arrives to start a new life with the husband she has known for only a short time. Through her...