Burning Bright

Tracy Chevalier

ISBN 10: 0452289661 / ISBN 13: 9780452289666

Published by Penguin, 2008

About this Item

Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 0.45.

Seller Inventory # G0452289661I3N00

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Burning Bright
• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication Date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0452289661
• ISBN 13: 9780452289666
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket

About this title

Synopsis

From the bestselling author of Girl With a Pearl Earring comes a stirring eighteenth-century coming-of- age tale

Tracy Chevalier, author of the international bestseller Girl With a Pearl Earring, returns with another brilliantly rendered historical tale set in the waning days of eighteenth-century London. Poet, artist, and printer William Blake works in obscurity as England is rocked by the shock waves of the French Revolution. Next door, the Kellaway family has just moved in, and country boy Jem Kellaway strikes up a tentative friendship with street?savvy Maggie Butterfield. As their stories intertwine with Blake?s, the two children navigate the confusing and exhilarating path to adolescence, and inspire the poet to create the work that enshrined his genius.

Review

Praise for ‘Burning Bright’:

'A visual delight. Chevalier's meticulous brushstrokes allow us to hear the "youthful harlot's curse" and feel "the damp souls of housemaids"'
The Times

'Burning Bright is an ambitious, impressively-researched novel...You can almost smell the smoke and mildewed clothes, see the gaunt, pock-marked faces of people struggling to survive and sense Jem's wonder as he gazes across the murky Thames to a perplexing world'
Daily Express

'A subtle clarity of style, quirky but seldom over-drawn characters, engaging touches of domestic detail and a splendidly vital recreation of Georgian London'
Sunday Times

'Vivid, romantic and pacey'
Daily Mail

'Those who admired Chevalier's atmospheric evocation of 17th-century Delft will find much to enjoy in her vivid reconstruction of late 18th-century London'
Guardian

More praise for ‘Burning Bright’:

‘Marvellously plotted...Chevalier masterfully works the themes and images of Blake's poetry into a tale of pure souls "burning bright" in a tarnished, slippery world'
Susan Vreeland, Waterstone's Books Quarterly

'Her pen-sketches of the squalor, smells and sounds of low-life London flesh out the history into immediacy'
Financial Times

'Entertaining and involving'
Literary Review

'Chevalier's characteristic love of detail - from the smells of the cattle market to a grotesque description of a man eating a pie - brings Georgian London vividly to life, while meticulous research allows her to weave fact and fiction into a convincing and persuasive narrative'
Irish Times

'Great pleasure is derived from Chevalier's vivid sense of place. In her hands, late 18th-century London and Lambeth in particular spring to life, and you see a city teetering on the brink of the rapid expansion and industrialisation that is about to change it forever'
Historical Novels Review