From the Booker-shortlisted author comes a sensuous, evocative novel exploring the lives of women in Victorian London, for fans of Sarah Waters, Emma Donoghue and Kate Atkinson
Michèle Roberts is the author of thirteen highly acclaimed novels, including The Looking Glass and Daughters of the House, which won the WHSmith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her most recent novel Ignorance was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2013 and her memoir Paper Houses was BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week. She has also published poetry and short stories, most recently collected in Mud- stories of sex and love (2010). Half-English and half-French, Michèle Roberts lives in South-East London. She is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. micheleroberts.co.uk
A magnificent writer
*Guardian*
Michèle Roberts is one of those writers descended perhaps as much
from Monet and Debussy as Virginia Woolf or Keats ... To read a
book by her is to savour colour, sound, taste, texture and touch as
never before
*The Times*
Her fictions are high-risk, unconventional ... The otherwise
cautious reader is taken almost without realising it into dangerous
and exhilarating territory
*Rachel Cusk*
A disciplined and elegant writer
*Observer*
Writing of such a high calibre can make you feel that the life of
the mind is everything, that the acute observation and intelligence
of the writer is a sort of mirror to what matters most in life …
Strong and lustrous prose
*Financial Times*
Roberts's greatest skill is the insight with which she writes about
women caught up in heightened states of awareness . . . Her writing
breaks new ground
*The Times*
One of Britain's best novelists
*Independent on Sunday*
Roberts is at her best when she writes about food and sex, about
feelings and desires that cut across boundaries of time and
class
*Sunday Times*
Roberts's polished, ornately wrought prose adds depth and a sense
of acute realism to her captivating story--which flows seamlessly
between the protagonists as they take turns narrating this
accomplished and inspired novel of wartime France.
*Publishers Weekly*
Expect to walk, sleep, eat, feel, touch, smell and fear with the
characters in this rich and haunting tale of two lives colliding
through time ... With her gift for awakening all out senses and
hurling us into strange goings-on, Roberts has created a
kaleidoscopically unsettling tale
*Sainsbury's Magazine*
An exploration of imagination as the keyhole through which we may
glimpse the otherwise unreachable past...A novel fuelled more by
poetry and ideas than by events: words are laid out to be savoured,
everyday details are observed and sensually reframed...The
stylistic mastery will delight readers
*Sunday Times*
London's seamy, irrepressible history is the star of an atmospheric
ghost story...A slow beginning gives way to an intoxicating blend
of the fanciful and the gritty
*Mail on Sunday*
Roberts interrogates past and present through vivid detail, from
the velvet-slippered rooms of the Victorian pleasure house to the
slick city bars in the modern metropolis
*Herald*
Roberts is a rare talent, a mellifluous writer who weaves spells
with words that draw the reader in like a crackling
hearth...Sensory descriptions are executed with exciting
precision...Roberts is a writer at the top of her game
*Daily Telegraph*
Roberts piles on the sensuous detail...also conjures the edgy
reality of city life...imagines lives lost to history
*Guardian*
The novel is a nod to the city's wandering writers, Dickens and
Woolf foremost among them...The language is lush and humid as a
hothouse, unabashedly sensual...This is above all else a London
novel - Covent Garden, Smithfields, Highgate Cemetery, Stew Lane
and Waterloo Bridge all pulse with as much life as the characters
who walk them...We are left no doubt that the joy of the city is
its dense human history
*Financial Times*
A haunting tale of desire and the exploitation of women in
Victorian London
*Grazia*
Expansive yet intimate... There's no sentimentality to be found
here, one of her novel's greatest strengths ...The love that
Roberts has for her city becomes almost palpable as her heroine
traces it by night, by day... it's also a reminder of the humanity
of the city, and the warm, and sometimes dangerous, messiness
humanity creates. Roberts makes the task of dipping one's toes back
in the past look easy; this is polished writing
*Herald*
The narrative structure echoes other novels that shuttle between
Victorian and modern settings, such as A.S. Byatt's Possession,
while the choppy intimacy of Roberts's style reaches back to
modernists such as Joyce...Roberts's setting starts to feel less
like a slice of London than a container of her imagination; a house
of fiction that is pulsing with ideas and brimming with life
*The Times*
A treat for the senses, as vivid in its re-creation of London's
past as in its evocation of the contemporary metropolis... What
Roberts captures brilliantly is the bright colours and shapes of
Southwark...This is not a novel to speed-read; pleasure builds from
the accumulation of detail
*Literary Review*
The author peels away the layers of place to reveal the past
pulsing within … As well as London’s pathways and water ways,
Roberts explores the human heart and, in lyrical language, locates
beauty in unexpected places
*Observer*
‘Roberts interrogates past and present through vivid detail, from
the velvet-slippered rooms of the Victorian pleasure houses to the
slick city bars in the modern metropolis’
*Woman’s Way*
richly atmospheric and poetic ... Full of rich colour and supple
evocation, this is a provocative novel whose strong flavours
linger
*Country Life*
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