April 14, 2026
City of the Muse, by Kate Hilton
“Never forget that the world will try to persuade you to chose the smallest possible life. The only thing worth having is freedom, and the world will fight against you having it, at every turn. If you desire approval, you will have to abstain from adventure. That is the choice we women must make: to bind ourselves to convention or to leap into the void and trust we can fly.”
Kate Hilton’s latest is a duel timeline historical fiction novel, a murder mystery, a ghost story, even, as well as a deep dive into archaeology and papyrology more specifically, as a group of English and Americans scramble to unearth ancient artifacts in the fictional Calliopolis in Egypt at the turn of the twentieth century, competing among one another to realize their visions for what stories these ancient fragments might be telling—as well as to profit from their value, though this goes against what is supposed to happen, as the artifacts discovered are not meant to leave Egypt.
The contemporary timeline is about Maddie, a young woman working at a the Toronto Archaeological Museum in Toronto who is lovelorn, estranged from her family, but hoping she’s finally found her own plot twist when she discovers an ancient scroll hidden in a jewellery box belonging to her great-aunt who’d worked on the aforementioned dig in Egypt more than a century before. Could something in the hidden scroll uncover the truth of what happened to Helen Gardiner, Maddie’s great-aunt’s friend and colleague, a skilled papyorologist whose murder perpetuated the story that Calliopolis was cursed?
As Maddie works to uncover the truth and solve the mystery of Helen’s murder, the parallels between how women are treated in the field and academia both then and now become undeniable, the same patterns echoing through the centuries, women having to defy convention and authority to get what they deserve and what they’re entitled to, so much so that the two storylines ends up speaking to each other. And by the novel’s conclusion, this is literally true, the effect of which is beautiful and satisfying.
