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About C. P. Lesley
C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her latest novel, Song of the Steadfast, appeared in June 2025.C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Steadfast, appeared in June 2025. In addition to the podcast episodes available here on the NBN, she often hosts interviews with novelists on her blog.
NBN Episodes hosted by C. P.:
March 19, 2026
Chivalry in the Shadows
Medieval Brittany, with all its contradictions and complexities, comes alive in Meg Wahlberg’s Chivalry in the Shadows (Parkwood Manor Press, 2024). T…
February 20, 2026
Anneke Jans in the New World
With the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America fast approaching, a small flood of novels set in the early days of coloniza…
January 20, 2026
The Sea Child
Cornwall, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was best known for its smuggling. The combination of an insular and impoverished countryside, a …
December 12, 2025
The Queen Who Came in from the Cold
Amateur detectives come in many forms. Owning a bookstore or a bakery, running a charming country inn, working in a library—even owning a cat or a dog…
November 12, 2025
The Bailiff’s Wife
Despite the long-held perception that medieval and early modern women were as quiet, pious, and obedient as society expected them to be, the truth is …
October 4, 2025
Murder in Miniature
When we meet Maple Bishop in the first book in her series, Death in the Details, she is reeling from a series of life-changing circumstances. Rural Ve…
September 11, 2025
The Queen's Companion
Eleanor of Aquitaine is best known as the wife of England’s Henry II, the mother of his numerous children—including two kings, Richard the Lionheart a…
August 13, 2025
The Entirely True Story of the Fantastical Mesmerist Nora Grey
This fascinating novel—dual-time historical with a fantastical overlay, based in part on the life of the author’s great-grandfather, a nineteenth-cent…
July 17, 2025
The Fire Concerto
This compelling debut novel explores the interconnected lives of three acclaimed female concert pianists: Clara Bishop; her teacher, Zofia Mikorska; a…
June 5, 2025
The Midnight Secret
Keeping details straight while writing a chronologically organized series is difficult enough. Focusing four full-length novels on the events of a sin…
May 6, 2025
The Eights
Joanna Miller’s The Eights (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2025) follows four women attending the University of Oxford in 1920. They are not the first female un…
April 15, 2025
Six Days in Bombay
Sona Falstaff, a hospital nurse in Bombay, has things more or less where she wants them. Yes, she faces a certain discrimination, positive and negativ…
March 19, 2025
Harlem Rhapsody
Most people in North America have probably at least heard the name W. E. B. Dubois. In the early twentieth century, DuBois—the first African-American …
February 18, 2025
Maya & Natasha
As Nazi tanks roll toward Leningrad in August 1941, an unmarried nineteen-year-old ballerina gives birth to twin girls in the soon-to-be besieged city…
January 9, 2025
The Stolen Queen
Charlotte Cross has built a satisfying career as assistant curator in the Department of Egyptian Art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum. It’s 1978, the…
December 18, 2024
The Wrong Lady Meets Lord Right
Arabella Grant doesn’t want to deceive London high society. It’s her cousin Lady Isabella, known as Issie, who convinces Arabella to take over so that…
November 19, 2024
The Jewel of the Blues
Life is tough for people of color in the early twentieth century—not only in the Southern states, which have put Reconstruction firmly behind them in …
October 21, 2024
Murder in Highbury
For a woman who published only four novels during her lifetime, with two others appearing shortly after her death and several incomplete or shorter wo…
September 25, 2024
A Daughter of Fair Verona
It takes a certain gall to update one of William Shakespeare’s most enduring and most beloved tragedies. Anyone who has survived an English literature…
September 10, 2024
The Booklover's Library
The Booklover's Library (Hanover Square Press, 2024) has one of the most dramatic openings I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of novels. It’s 1931 in…
August 19, 2024
Death and the Visitors
Today I talked to Heather Redmond about her new novel Death and the Visitors (Kensington, 2024). In this second Regency-era mystery featuring Mary Go…
July 8, 2024
Daughters of Shandong
Daughters of Shandong (Berkley Books, 2024), the author’s first and based on the life of her grandmother, follows the fortunes of a mother and three d…
June 18, 2024
A Shore Thing
Joanna Lowell is known for her witty historical romances set in late Victorian England, a period both undergoing and resisting dramatic social change.…
May 25, 2024
A Fool for an Heir
Few destinies are more challenging than life in the orbit of a man obsessed with expanding his power at all costs. Such is the fate endured by Ivan Iv…