Park Lane by Frances Osborne and Abdication by Juliet Nicolson: review Juliet Nicolson's first novel, Abdication, is set in the same sort of world as Park Lane, with a similar set of characters, and it too begins in the months leading up to a big event. It is 1936 and May has just started as chauffeuse and secretary to a senior politician in Baldwin's government. The youngest daughter of a sugar plantation owner in Barbados, she has come to England to escape her oppressive father and follow her mother's invocation to find lasting love. One of May's first jobs is to drive her employer's houseguest to Sunningdale, where she unwittingly witnesses the recently enthroned King Edward relaxing over cocktails with the American divorcee Wallis Simpson. From then on, Nicolson's characters proceed, Zelig-like, to bump into some of the period's key historical figures. Mosley, Orwell, Woolf, the young Elizabeth II, John Reith, even Hitler, are shoehorned into a story that showcases the author's grasp of historical fact at the expense of her feel for fiction. And the moment of abdication, when it finally comes, is surprisingly muffled. Despite creating a character who gives us front-row access to Wallis and Edward, Nicolson fails to shed light on the secret of their relationship, or the reasons for their bewildering actions. There is a similar reserve to her handling of the novel's other love story - between May and a friend of her employer's family. None the less, Abdication is impressive in its scope and ambition. Ranging across countries and milieux - not just the palace at Windsor and the royal yacht on the Med, but also a Jewish home in the East End, a flee-ridden boarding house in Wigan and the Crystal Palace studios of the BBC - Nicolson is encyclopedic in her portrayal of a fascinating period of history. Park Lane by Frances Osborne 322pp, Virago, t £12.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) Telegraph Books (RRP £14.99, ebook £14.99) Abdication by Juliet Nicolson 361pp, Bloomsbury, t £14.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) Telegraph Books (RRP £16.99, ebook £17)