This historical novel, which imagines the life of the man known to history as Lambert Simnel, pretender to the English throne, was utterly absorbing and is one of my favourite books of this year so far.

What we know from history about “Lambert Simnel” is not much. He was the figurehead of a short-lived rebellion against Henry VII in 1487. The Yorkist rebels who wanted to unseat Henry claimed that Simnel was really Edward Planagenet, the son of the late George, Duke of Clarence, rightful heir to the throne (despite the fact that the real Edward was safely in prison under Henry’s control at the time — there seems to have been a suggestion that the “real” heir, Simnel, had been hidden away with a humble family in the countryside while the imprisoned Edward was actually the fake). Simnel played no leading role in the rebellion, being only about ten years old (this novel makes him a little older, but still basically a child) and, unusually for royal pretenders, he was pardoned and reportedly given a job in the royal kitchens, as suited his humble background. Then he disappears from the historical record.

With no more than this to go on, Jo Harkin creates a wonderful, vivid, well-rounded life for the boy who begins life as a farm lad named John, becomes a pretender named Lambert Simnel, and is believed by a few (or do they believe it at all? Is it a purely cynical matter of selecting a child who looks enough like the York heir to be credible?) to be Edward, Earl of Warwick. The different worlds Lambert moves through on his strange coming-of-age journey are brilliantly sketched, but this isn’t just an imaginative recreation of a historical footnote. It’s a thoughtful and sometimes heartbreaking exploration of identity — how each of us moves through many roles, many selves, even if we don’t change our names as we travel through life. What’s lost and what’s left behind in each one, and how we are all, in some ways, pretenders.

This was a big, bold, beautiful novel and it will stay with me for a long time.

This was a lovely piece of historical fiction told through the format of (fictional) 17th century letters and documents allegedly found by a Canadian researcher named Anne. The blurring of lines between the real Anne Fleming, author, and the fictional researcher Anne whose voice narrates the discovery of these documents, offers a key to understanding the whole book. For while Fleming’s main characters — two village children named Joan and Thomasina, orphaned by plague, who as adults both end up in the orbit of Lady Margaret Long, a scientifically minded woman who has the wealth and position to satisfy her curiosity — are fictional, their world is very real. Several of the minor characters who appear in the story’s pages are real, also. (If I have one quibble with this otherwise beautifully told tale, it’s that I always enjoy an Afterword in which the author of a historical novel points out which characters and events are lifted from actual history; in this case, I had to look quite a few things up myself to see where the blurred lines between history and fiction were drawn).

Most importantly, the conflicts Joan and Tom (the name of Thomasina’s dead twin brother, which Thomasina prefers using) face are real, and rooted in the times they live in. An intelligent, curious, independent young woman like Joan, born in to poverty and further marginalized by the plague that kills the rest of her family, does not have the resources available to a woman like Margaret Long. Instead, intellectual curiosity and independence are qualities more likely to lead to an accusation of witchcraft for a poor woman like Joan. Meanwhile, Tom finds it easier, as further mischance strip away ever person Tom has ever cared about, to reinvent himself. Now he not only uses a boy’s name, but dresses as a boy and begins to identify as a man rather than a woman. This, too, creates fiction out of genuine history: throughout all times and cultures, there have always been a small minority of people who have chosen, out of desire or necessity, to “pass” as members of a different gender than the one that aligns with their sex at birth. Thomasina is not only more comfortable as Tom, but more successful, so that by the time Joan and Tom are reunited as young adults, many things have to be re-evaluated — but there’s hardly time to do that, before external superstition and authority intervene to threaten everything.

OK, I do have one more small quibble with this book, and it’s about Tom’s self-transformation in to a man. He spends several years as a sailor aboard various ships, and finally gives up because, as he says in a letter explaining his past, the men with whom he sailed eventually grew suspicious of the fact that the young cabin boy never grew a beard or seemed to get any older. So he moves to life on land — but there, he attends a boys’ school, has a long-term friendship with another young man, and later goes on an extended sea voyage with many other men, yet his beardless condition never again seems to arouse any curiosity. Also, while Tom has an ingenious solution for getting around the problem of young men urinating in front of each other, there is no mention of him having to deal with menstruation, which I thought was an odd omission. So there were a few gaps here in the plausibility of Tom’s story.

Despite those nitpicks, I did find myself absorbed in this book. I loved the language; Fleming does a brilliant job of recreating the style and erratic spelling of 17th century English writers while at the same time keeping the book readable and flowing smoothly for a modern reader. I also loved the openness of the ending, not tying up loose ends but allowing both writer and reader to imagine possible outcomes for the characters.