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FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK Queen Macbeth Val McDermid, Polygon, $29.99 Scottish crime queen Val McDermid has screwed her courage to the sticking-place to imagine the secret history of Lady Macbeth. In Queen Macbeth, the author attempts to unravel the violence done to this real historical figure by history and, of course, by Shakespeare’s play.

In this telling, Lady Macbeth is re-established as Gruoch. Her husband did kill Duncan – but on the field on battle, not in a bedroom – and was deposed by his enemies. But Gruoch survives, accompanied by three women from her household, and must escape to Macbeth’s allies on the Isle of Mull.



There’s much we don’t know about life in 10th-century Scotland, but McDermid supplements what we do know about medieval history with playful imagination and intertextual reference. It’ll be great fun for anyone who knows Shakespeare’s tragedy, offering the reader a fascinating glimpse of what lies behind the long shadow of Shakespeare’s politically motivated portrayal. The Coast Road Alan Murrin, Bloomsbury, $32.

99 Set in County Donegal in 1994, when divorce was still prohibited in Ireland, Alan Murrin’s debut novel draws its force from precise sketches of women trapped within the confines of marriages they can’t easily escape. That doesn’t stop Colette Crowley, a bohemian poet, from pursuing an affair with a married man in Dublin, and when her husband Shaun punishes her for it – throwing her out and refusing to let her visit.

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