The Book of Fires - Softcover

Borodale, Jane

3.66

2,540 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014311848X ISBN 13: 9780143118480

Publisher: Penguin Group USA, 2010

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"A spectacular debut" (Booklist) reminiscent of Geraldine Brook's Year of Wonders.

It is 1752, and seventeen-year-old Agnes Trussel is pregnant with an unwanted child. Facing certain misery at home, she flees rural Sussex for London. Overwhelmed by the crowded, grim streets, Agnes finds herself at the home of Mr. J. Blacklock, a brooding fireworks maker who hires her as an apprentice. As she learns to make joins his quest to make the most spectacular fireworks the world has ever seen. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on Agnes's secret-but her mysterious mentor is hatching plans of his own.

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Review:

"A quietly beautiful novel...elegant use of language...inventive storytelling."
-BookPage

..".stunning debut novel...exceptionally well-crafted, beautifully written."
-The Historical Novels Review

"Jane Borodale writes historical fiction with a twist in the tale, without sentimentality. Agnes Trussel is a heroine armed only with doggedness, ingenuity, and desperation, who marches toward her future with an intrepid spirit. An engrossing story."
-Karleen Koen, bestselling author of Through a Glass Darkly and Now Face to Face

A "promising debut."
-Kirkus

"Borodale deftly conjures up mid-18th century London in her spectacular debut...Readers who loved Jane Eyre will appreciate the atmosphere of tension and foreboding that permeates the narrative."
-Booklist

"Jane Borodale's captivating debut novel carried me back to a world where even strong young women had few options. Her astonishing descriptions of 18th-century England, the creation of fireworks, and the brave and determined Agnes held me happily captive there for days, and, even now, have not released their hold on me. Agnes Trussel is sure to become one of 21st-century literature's most enduring characters."
-Brunonia Barry, New York Times bestselling author of The Lace Reader

"Jane Borodale's first novel contains a wondrous and utterly believable world built by the subtle accretion of precise detail. Young Agnes Trussel is a clever and innocent heroine. I found myself cheering when, by the end, she-and the very novel that contains her story-burst into new and luminous life."
-Lauren Groff, New York Times bestselling author of The Monsters of Templeton

"Jane Borodale has a way with words that had me smelling the foul streets of 18th-century London and tasting the strange powders that went into making John Blacklock's fireworks. The story of the apprentice Agnes learning from the master Blacklock is reminiscent of The Girl with the Pearl Earring."
-Anne Easter Smith, author of A Rose for the Crown and The King's Grace

"Whether in evoking rural Sussex at a time of change or the precariousness of life in the metropolis, Jane Borodale displays a deft touch in this very pleasing story."
-Telegraph

From the Author:

Agnes Trussel’s story came to me in a flash, one cold night at a bonfire on Dartmoor, and grew from there, slowly, over four years. I began to write and found there were different layers to the shape I was attempting: there were the ideas I wanted to explore, and the more concrete occurrences I needed to show for the story to progress. There were the atmospheres and textures I wanted the story to steep in, and there was the path through the information I’d gathered whilst researching eighteenth-century life and the history of pyrotechny. I also found that a novel has its own microclimate, and often things seem to just happen inside it, of their own accord.

I had a childhood passion for fireworks; the fifth of November was quite significant where I grew up in Sussex, and the man who ran the local shop made his own fireworks – very loud, plain and erratic, which he would set off later in the evening when the display was over and the bonfire had died down. It struck me even as a child as a vigorous kind of subversive activity.

I loved the idea of fire being the catalyst for change, for luck, for strength, for magic, and for danger. It is rich in symbolism, and I wanted my firework maker John Blacklock to be enigmatic, dark, with something of the Promethean myth about him. I was fascinated by the discovery of coloured fireworks – which finally happened towards the end of the century – but even more intrigued by the thought of the time before the discovery itself; the period of searching and experimentation, hope and disappointment, that led to the crucial moment when the gap in knowledge was filled.

Whilst writing I also became increasingly interested in the lot of the rural and urban underclass as enclosure and industrialisation rapidly altered the countryside and town. The Old Bailey accounts of those hanged in the name of the law, for often the smallest of crimes in the face of abject poverty, became part of the story as parallels and quickeners to Agnes’s plight. I felt that her character grew directly out of the landscape she had left behind – and I was interested in exposing her to the city as a place of ideas, of change. I also wanted to explore the tug of home in dream and memory during a life lived elsewhere.

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