London, 1668. The Great Fire is an ashen memory, and the city is clawing back to life. Lucy North is just trying to stay afloat. Her father is dead, the debts are a noose, and her mother is desperate. Marriage is the only currency left. Thomas Ashwell, a young apothecary with a soft voice, seems like a reprieve. Then comes the fall. A head injury. The wedding bells dissolve into a medicinal fog. Lucy is confined to a room that feels like a cage, haunted by a voice in her head that isn't hers. It is a psychological breakdown in a time before we had a name for it.

Giles skips the romanticized noise. This is about walls closing in. Lucy’s journey is a calculated stripping of her agency. Thomas is a complicated figure; a doting protector whose "cures" only serve to cloud the truth. The tension lies in the ambiguity of care. Is Lucy being saved, or is she being buried alive in a narrative rewritten by men? The book refuses to provide a comfortable exit.

The themes feel jagged and modern. We call it gaslighting now; in 1668, it was just the social architecture of being a woman. The loss of self is a universal horror. Giles captures that specific dread of having your own reality denied by the person holding the medicine spoon. It is a reminder that the most dangerous terrain isn't a dark alley in London, but a quiet bedroom where your word carries no weight.

The prose is lean. The pacing mirrors Lucy’s vertigo, moving from sharp desperation to a warped, hallucinatory state. It is a deliberate choice that forces you to share her disorientation. Some might find the feverish sequences a bit dense, but they serve the central question of trust. This is a cold, intellectual thriller that happens to be wearing a corset, but the bones underneath are raw and real.

It left a mark. No cheap sentimentality here, just a lingering unease. The "stranger" in Lucy's head is the hook that keeps the reader off-balance until the final page. It is a solid, jagged piece of historical fiction that refuses to play nice. A reminder that a quiet room with a man who thinks he knows what's best for you can be the deadliest trap of all.

A glimpse into life in the 17th Century. Not an easy time and our characters all trying to make the most of a hard life and avoid the gallows. Some of the goings on seem truly shocking - did they really cook puppies and indulge in cannibalism from those poor unfortunates who didn’t avoid the hangman!? A sobering thought.
We encounter the great stink of London and the Great Fire as well. What a dreadful time that must have been but it all becomes part of the cosmopolitan life going on in this tale. It’s a captivating story and just a bit different. I found each character really intriguing. They all had a fascinating part to play and some more so than others.
If you enjoy historical tales then this is definitely one for you.

This book is split into three sections and I definitely preferred the first and third when it was told from the main protagonist. I understand why they kept the second part in because it added to the mystery and eventual ending. It was interesting to find out about history of London after the great fire and extremes the medical people went to to cut maladies. A truly great feminist work

Thank you to The Pan Macmillan Marketing Team for sending me an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The blurb: “The plague has passed, the fire has cooled, and Lucy North is in desperate need of a husband . . . From the acclaimed author of Mere comes a thrilling new tale of medicine, marriage and madness set in seventeenth-century London.

London, 1668. Though the streets hum with promise following the restoration of the crown, Lucy North is trapped. Her father's recent death has left her mother saddled with debts she cannot pay. Lucy must marry the first man willing to take her without a dowry.

So when she meets Thomas Ashwell, a young and charming apothecary, Lucy quickly identifies an attractive route out. She falls in love easily, and when Thomas proposes she believes her future is finally secured.

But when Lucy falls and injures her head during their wedding party, things start to warp. Confined to her bedroom her dreams refuse to leave her at daybreak, and the voice in her head no longer sounds like her own. As Thomas plies her with tinctures and cures, a creeping fear takes root: Has this marriage saved her? Or will it bring about her end?”

This is the second book I have read by this author and I enjoyed it immensely. without giving anything away, it is a very different novel and one which I have thought about often since I finished reading it. The writing style really suits the time in which the book was set which makes it feel really authentic. The characters are believable and I became really invested in Lucy and her outcome. There are some unexpected twists I never saw coming. This book gave me feelings of claustrophobia, probably because in the 1600’s women had little control over their lives or destines. Overall, I would say this is another great book by Danielle Giles.

Review posted on Goodreads, Fable and Waterstones

Finally! Oh, I can’t tell you how thrilled I am finally to have a 2026 novel that gobs a mighty spit in the face of Dead Lesbian Syndrome, after my galling disappointment in ‘The Brides’ by Charlotte Cross this year, last month’s ‘She Feeds on Misery’ by Emily Vale, and the upcoming Erin Kelly title ‘The Night Stairs’. I’ve been disproportionately disheartened this year by releases proliferating DLS. Just like ‘Bury Your Gays’, Dead Lesbian Syndrome widely covers any and all villainising of queer female characters, where Sapphic attraction’s tokenistic and where heteronormativity generally triumphs over vilified queer women who never get happy endings. But here, instead, the marvellous Danielle Giles gives us (spoiler!) the lesbian who comes back from the dead for her happy ending!

I should’ve known Giles wouldn’t disappoint, off the back of her superlative debut, ‘Mere’. In fact, I did a little dance when I heard about her second novel coming out. Just like those in ‘Mere’, Giles’s female cast for ‘Gentle Things’ comprises shrewd, poised, magnanimous women capable of ferocious devotion and resilience. And again, Giles crafts a similar kind of claustrophobic gloom to ‘Mere’ in which she can manoeuvre her marvellous figures – Kate, Brigit, Lucy.

What I love about Giles’s writing is its precision: her precision in style, precision in characterisation, atmosphere; but above all, her meticulousness in pulling theme from plot. Here, she dissects the inequality of medicine (‘For nothing cracks in the same manner as a skull’). You can’t help but admire her virtuosity. Through a historical representation, Giles gulders her condemnation of the contemporary gender health gap (some compelling statistics can be found at: https://www.thewomensorganisation.org.uk/the-gender-health-gap-shocking-statistics-you-need-to-know/ ).

By-the-by, if you appreciate Giles’s undertaking here, I’d recommend another new release for 2026 by Bar Fridman-Tell, which I just finished reading – ‘Honeysuckle’. It’s also an indictment of male control of women’s body autonomy. It explores the theme of limiting women’s bodily rights and limiting female self-determination in a half-fairytale/half-gothic, dreamy and delicate retelling of myth. Danielle Giles’s novel, conversely, delivers a tempestuous rage against misogyny in medicine and the ‘default man’ mode. (Thomas admits, ‘Young men are the most often used in the medicines for all persons’.)

Let’s say the subtitle to ‘Gentle Things’ should be ‘Medicinal Cannibalism: Seventeenth-century Consumption of Corpses’ (‘“People always told me I was hard to stomach”’). Danielle Giles gives us Shakespearean levels of brutality and gore. Without any spoilers – just saying, the discovery of what's under the bed? Authentic Lady Macbeth! (‘There,’ she says. ‘There, I have tidied it back away.’) The women’s tripartite relationships (Kate and Lucy, Kate and Brigit, Lucy and Brigit) power the novel. Kate, especially, is majestic.

The writing, fluidly beautiful as it is, reminded me of ‘The Household’ by Stacey Halls:

‘It is the beginning of November, when the afternoon light pours down and cools golden. Mithras, had he pressed his palms to a single courtyard in London and found himself content. Even in the air, the motes of soot and pollen are gilded, so that every step leaves behind a swirling golden wake.’

But, all credit to Danielle Giles, this is completely individual – there’s nothing like it. Would I say that her slinky sort of humour is just as good as T. Kingfisher’s heroines’ voices? Yes. I’d say, perhaps, that if you love Bridget Collins and Elizabeth Macneal, if you enjoyed ‘The Corset’ by Laura Purcell, you’ll relish this.

I threw myself into the first part of the novel, then when Part Two began to slither its way towards the true premise of the plot - I was reeled in. And Part Three? What a furious tightening of the noose. I came to feel the novel’s true frisson around 90% and was electrified by it! So, a gigantic thank you to Pan Macmillan | Mantle for giving me the opportunity to read a digital review copy.

‘[T]he song will reach further down. Rattling old bones, sliding into the spaces where tongues once moved. The dead will take it with them into dreams, and soon there will be not a person in London who does not know the melody.’

Honestly, what a great book!
Witty and well written characters. Great creepy and uncomfortable moments that build as the story sucks you in.
If you like historical fiction or gothic horror this is a must read!

An enthralling gem of a novel..... highly descriptive and interesting........... I was thoroughly immersed......

For fans of all things gothic! I don't wanna be dramatic, but this book was brilliant. Could not recommend it more! Have never read a book so fast!
So gripping and so dark. Had to stay up very late to finish it - I inhaled it

This is an original and absorbing take on the late 1600s that's rich with detail and atmosphere. I loved this. London felt alive and both familiar and utterly alien. The theme of misogyny and coercive control is well handled. I loved the nods to The Yellow Wallpaper and the medical detail. This is a triumph of a book. Beautifully written and compelling throughout.

Another wonderful book by Danielle Giles. Much like her previous book Mere it was beautifully written, unsettling, and twisty. Such rich and original prose, but could have been a tad shorter.