Birdcage Walk

It is 1792 and Europe is seized by political turmoil and violence.

Lizzie Fawkes has grown up in Radical circles where each step of the French Revolution is followed with eager idealism. But she has recently married John Diner Tredevant, a property developer who is heavily invested in Bristol's housing boom, and he has everything to lose from social upheaval and the prospect of war.

Soon his plans for a magnificent terrace built above the two-hundred-foot drop of the Gorge come under threat. Diner believes that Lizzie's independent, questioning spirit must be coerced and subdued. She belongs to him: law and custom confirm it, and she must live as he wants.

In a tense drama of public and private violence, resistance and terror, Diner's passion for Lizzie darkens until she finds herself dangerously alone.

A stirring and visceral exploration of women’s lives in Georgian Britain, Birdcage Walk considers the traces we leave through history when we die through the voices of women who dared to think beyond the confines of their time.

Described by Kate Kellaway in a glowing review for The Guardian as 'the finest novel Helen Dunmore has written', Birdcage Walk was also Dunmore’s last. Published before her death from cancer in 2017 it contains many of the themes that suffuse her novels; love, family, identity and what legacy we bequeath to later generations. Dunmore, in an interview on BBC R4’s Open Book shortly before her death commented of the novel: “I think of what is the mark that any human being leaves behind, which when you are very ill you’re bound to think about... ‘What is the purpose of my existence? Have I fulfilled my existence?’ and the characters are asking that question of themselves...”

ISBN: 9780099592761

Год издания: 2017

Язык: Английский

Number of pages: 416
Weight: 287 g
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 26 mm