This was a DNF.

Nicolson's non-fiction releases, The Great Silence and The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm are amazing resources for their subjects, and Nicolson makes the people of those books come alive through their letters and memoirs. Unfortunately, the talent for bringing real people alive does not translate to bringing fictional characters alive, and Abdication suffers from flat, lifeless characters tenfold.

Nicolson can write: her turns of phrase, her descriptions, and her insights are lovely, the plot is also set on the cusp of major events--Edward VIII's abdication to marry Wallis Simpson, the rise of Hitler, socialist challenging the status quo--and her fictional characters hover on the periphery of this frantic period in British history. Unfortunately, none of this connects with one another. We have May Thomas, an Anglo-Barbadian chauffeur, Evangeline Nettlefold, a fictional childhood friend of Wallis, and Julian Richardson, a budding socialist, and all three smack dab in the middle of the aforementioned crises of 1936. Yet, they do absolutely nothing.

I made it to the halfway point before finally admitting to myself that the book was going nowhere. There are pages and pages of backstory, internal ruminations, and half-described conversations, and a narrative that loops confusing back and over itself time and time again. Many times this did not feel like a novel, but yet another non-fiction release from Nicolson, particularly when she spent so much time introducing the real-life players like the King, Wallis, Chips Channon, etc, and filling chapters with descriptions of these people and how the connected with the fictional characters. Now and then the plot chugged to a start, only to be subsumed once more by oodles of description and biography.

What we have here is a great plot and potentially interesting characters bogged down by prose, prose, and more prose, with little actual storytelling. Ironically, the most charismatic characters were the real people, which goes to show that Nicolson shines best as a chronicler of history, and not as a novelist.