Black Kestrel

Fiction & Literature

With selection notes

Distant Music

Lee Langley

English · 2003 edition

A love story spanning six centuries, opening in 1429 on a Madeira consumed by a fire that has blazed for seven years, as a peasant girl and a Jewish boy off a Portuguese ship meet — their thwarted love recurring across generations.

Fiction & Literature

With selection notes

Tango in Madeira

Jim Williams

English · 2013 edition

Set in Madeira after WWI, a disillusioned ex-soldier tries to rescue his family’s failing wine business as the island fills with real figures of the era — an exiled emperor, Agatha Christie at Reid’s Hotel, George Bernard Shaw learning to tango — and a murder draws him in.

Fiction & Literature

Friends in Funchal

KG Fleury

English · 2022 edition

Set in 1811, a Quaker doctor leaves his London practice for Funchal hoping Madeira’s climate will cure his consumption — a vivid depiction, with nods to Dickens and Austen, of an island under military occupation and the people he meets.

Fiction & Literature

The Flower Garden

Margaret Pemberton

English · 2012 edition

In the 1930s, told she is dying, Nancy Leigh Cameron leaves New York for the exclusive Sanfords hotel on flower-filled Madeira — not knowing that the man she comes to love is her father’s bitterest enemy.