
Summary
An orphan poses nervously for a Renaissance maestro in medieval Siena and an artist’s servant girl in seventeenth-century Amsterdam snatches a moment away from her work to lose herself in tales of knights and battles.
A woman reading in a Shoreditch bar catches the eye of a young man who takes her picture and a Victorian medium holds a book that she barely acknowledges while she waits for the exposure.
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781844086870 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1844086879 |
| Author: | Katie Ward |
| Publisher: | Little, Brown Book Group |
| Imprint: | Virago Press Ltd |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 352 |
| Release Date: | 29 May 2012 |
| Weight: | 287g |
| Dimensions: | 198mm x 126mm x 26mm |
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What They're Saying
Critics Review
A real wow of a first novel. The premise is alarmingly simple and yet somehow stunning: seven portraits, seven artists, seven girls and women reading… A wonderful, imaginative evocation of seven different worlds… It’s very rare for a novel to have a real freshness and originality but at the same time to evoke echoes of other literary memories. This feels incredibly clever. It’s a book packed full of adventures and stories and you completely lose yourself in them… This book’s great strength: the perfect, separate, involving worlds it creates. Like Mitchell, Ward is equally adept at shifting between completely different registers and voices… It [has] real beating heart… It will be fascinating to see what she writes next. - Viv Groskop, The Times
A debut of rare individuality and distinction. Katie Ward inhabits each of her seven eras with a fluent and intuitive touch, and sentence by sentence, deft and mercurial, she surpasses the reader’s expectations. - Hilary MantelAbout The Author
Katie Ward
Katie Ward was born in Somerset in 1979. She has worked in the public and voluntary sectors, including at a women’s refuge and for a Member of Parliament. Katie lives in Suffolk with her husband and cat.
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