Name of the game

A take on the fascinating true story of a man who would be king falls short of its high ambitions.

- ANNA ROGERS

It's a bold claim: "Wolf Hall meets Demon Copperhead". Comparisons can be tricky. Publishers make them, of course, to place a book for potential readers, to whet their appetites. But the danger of overreach and disappointed expectations is always there. The blurb of Vikram Seth's desperately overlong novel A Suitable Boy likened it to Middlemarch. Not so much.

Yes, Jo Harkin's second novel, The Pretender, is set not many years before Hilary Mantel's masterpiece - the time of Henry VII rather than Henry VIII - and it's inspired by a real person. Yes, like Barbara Kingsolver's extraordinary contemporary nod to David Copperfield, it's the story of a boy struggling through chaos and danger. But there any similarities end.