The Walworth Beauty - Softcover

Roberts, Michèle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1408883422 ISBN 13: 9781408883426

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018

Synopsis

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

2011: When Madeleine loses her job as a lecturer, she decides to leave her riverside flat in cobbled Stew Lane, where history never feels far away, and move to Apricot Place. Yet here too, in this quiet Walworth cul-de-sac, she senses the past encroaching: a shifting in the atmosphere, a current of unseen life.

1851: and Joseph Benson has been employed by Henry Mayhew to help research his articles on the working classes. A family man with mouths to feed, Joseph is tasked with coaxing testimony from prostitutes. Roaming the Southwark streets, he is tempted by brothels' promises of pleasure - and as he struggles with his assignment, he seeks answers in Apricot Place, where the enigmatic Mrs Dulcimer runs a boarding house.

As these entwined stories unfold, alive with the sensations of London past and present, the two eras brush against each other - a breath at Madeleine's neck, a voice in her head - the murmurs of ghosts echoing through time. Rendered in immediate, intoxicating prose, The Walworth Beauty is a haunting tale of desire and exploitation, isolation and loss, and the faltering search for human connection; this is Michèle Roberts at her masterful best.

About this title

Review:

A magnificent writer (Helen Dunmore 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 (Susie Boyt 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. (Starred Review for IGNORANCE 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 2017-04-01)

Book Description:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1408883422
• ISBN 13: 9781408883426
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400