Heritage fiction wants the past behind glass: clean labels, tasteful lighting, a neat moral you can carry home like a souvenir. Kate Foster writes like she’s sick of that whole museum. She doesn’t “bring history to life” in the cosy way publishers mean it. She drags it back into the street, still bleeding ink, still full of witnesses nobody bothered to interview. And she makes sure you can see the seams where the official story was stitched together to hide the mess.
Foster comes out of journalism, and you can feel that training in the way she handles power: sceptical, impatient, allergic to the comforting narrative. She writes like someone who’s spent years watching institutions polish their own reflections. In her novels, the past isn’t a pageant. It’s a courtroom. It’s a cell. It’s a bed where somebody realises “duty” is just a prettier word for captivity. That’s her signature: historical fiction that refuses the soft-focus lie.
The Maiden is her opening punch. She takes a real seventeenth-century Edinburgh scandal—the murder of Lord James Forrester and the trial of Lady Christian Nimmo—and she does the opposite of heritage’s favourite trick. She doesn’t turn it into a costume drama about forbidden love. She turns it into an indictment of how women get narrated when men and law are the ones holding the pen. The book is steeped in the machinery of reputation, testimony, class shielding, and the way a woman’s voice can be treated as decorative until it becomes inconvenient. Foster’s Edinburgh isn’t quaint. It’s claustrophobic. The closes don’t “evoke atmosphere”; they trap you inside a social order built to make certain bodies pay for men’s appetites.
Heritage fiction likes its women brave in private and compliant in public; Foster writes women who don’t fit the frame, and she refuses to crop them down to something printable.
Then she follows with The King’s Witches, and if you expected a “difficult second novel” that plays safe, tough luck. She sets it in late sixteenth-century Scotland around Anna of Denmark’s arrival and the beginnings of Scotland’s witch mania, and she treats witch trials the way they deserve to be treated: not as gothic entertainment, not as candlelit folklore, but as state violence with a theological alibi. Foster’s witches aren’t cute. The fear isn’t romantic. It’s procedural. The accusation itself becomes a tool—useful to men with influence, useful to neighbours with grudges, useful to a culture that needs scapegoats to keep its hierarchy standing.
What Foster is really tearing up is the heritage genre’s addiction to “timelessness.” Those books love to pretend the past is a human-interest story floating above politics. Foster refuses. Her settings are built out of systems: marriage as diplomacy, purity as policy, religion as enforcement, class as destiny. Even when she writes desire, she writes it with consequences attached. Her characters don’t get to have feelings in a vacuum. They have them under surveillance.
Her prose style matches that worldview. It’s not the plush, perfumed sentence-work that tries to make suffering look “lyrical.” She writes with grit and pace, but also with a sharp eye for how language itself becomes a weapon—who is allowed to speak, who is believed, who is recorded, who is erased. That’s the journalist’s instinct turned literary: not just telling a story, but interrogating how stories get authorised.
And she keeps coming back to Scotland not as brand identity, but as obsession. Edinburgh in Foster’s work isn’t a postcard city; it’s a pressure chamber where law, church, and gossip collaborate. You can tell she’s fascinated—maybe even possessed—by how a place can sell itself as cultured while burying the bodies under its own myth. That’s why the stitches stay visible. She’s not trying to soothe the reader into the past. She’s trying to stop the reader using the past as comfort.
Her upcoming The Mourning Necklace, built around the case of Maggie Dickson—the woman who survived her own execution in 1724—fits the pattern perfectly. Foster isn’t hunting “remarkable women” to uplift anyone. She’s hunting the points where the system failed to finish the job, and what society did next to turn that failure into a story it could live with. She writes the afterlife of scandal: how communities metabolise a woman who won’t die on schedule.
Foster’s gift is refusing catharsis: she won’t let you leave history feeling cleansed, because clean is what power wants the record to look like.
So no, this isn’t heritage fiction you can read for the vibe. Foster is here to wreck the vibe. She writes the past as a live wire, and she keeps her hand on it until you feel what it does to the people who weren’t protected by lineage, money, or male credibility. If the genre wants stitched-up nostalgia, she’ll keep ripping the hem—until it stops passing for literature.
