Music & Silence, by Rose Tremain (Vintage, £6.99 in UK)

Reluctant to step into a historical novel - especially if it's set in 17th-century Denmark? Then don't read the opening page of Music & Silence, for it will take you straight into the flickering lamplight of a panelled room in the palace of Rosenborg, and the troubled lives of Peter Claire, lutenist, King Christan IV, monarch, Kirsten Munk, "almost-Queen" and sexual predator, and the Tilsen family, whose antics would set the word "dysfunctional" into a dizzy tailspin. A sumptuous swirl of gloriously flawed humanity (the madness of an Irish earl and the misery of a Danish toddler are conveyed with equal pathos), Music & Silence is suffused with the mists, the darkness, the wind and snow of its northern setting, and steeped in the sort of detail which gives palpable life to a forgotten past - some of whose tragedies, such as Christian's struggle to wrest silver from an icebound Norwegian mine, with disastrous results for the local inhabitants, have a disturbingly contemporary ring.