Birdcage Walk by Helen Dunmore was first published in 2017. It says on the cover ‘The finest novel Dunmore has written.’ Sadly it was also the last one she wrote as she discovered as she was editing the book that she was seriously ill.
The setting is Bristol around the time of the French Revolution. Lizzie Fawkes is a young married woman, her husband John Diner Tredevant is a property developer, he had been married before, to a French woman who had died while visiting France. Lizzie’s mother Julia hadn’t ever really warmed to her son-in-law, but Lizzie had never much liked her step-father Augustus, and she likes him even less when she discovers that her mother is pregnant, at her age it seems far too dangerous.
Julia is well known in Radical circles as she’s a writer of speeches and pamphlets, it’s a dangerous occupation though as the British government is naturally worried about revolutionary acts spreading from France.
There had been a housing boom in Bristol, until the trouble in France makes everybody jittery, they know that war with France is likely, and nobody is interested in buying new houses. Lizzie’s husband is going to be in deep financial trouble, but he’s already causing trouble for Lizzie as he becomes more and more controlling.
This was a great read.
The Guardian review said: ‘A blend of beauty and horror evoked with such breathtaking poetry that it haunts me still.’
The setting is Cornwall 1920, but the story often slips back to the World War 1 experiences of Daniel and Frederick, and their childhood together. Frederick and his sister Felicia are the children of a man who had made money in Australian mines, as Daniel’s mother had been the cleaner for the family she had become close to their mother, when the mother died Daniel’s mother helped with bringing up the children. But Frederick and Felicia go to private schools, Frederick isn’t interested in learning. It’s Daniel who is the clever one, but he knows he’s never going to be able to stay on at the village school, or have the opportunities that Frederick will have. But they still manage to have a close frienship. When war breaks out they find themselves in the same unit, but of course Frederick is an officer and Daniel isn’t. Only one of them comes back from the war.
The Seal Cove by Helen Dunmore was published in 2001. It’s part of a trilogy, the others are The Lilac Tree and The Silver Bead which I’ve read. I just noticed when I started to read this one that my copy is signed by the author.
Zennor in Darkness by Helen Dunmore was published in 1993 and it’s the first book that the author had published. It won the McKitterick prize which is apparently for debut novels by authors over the age of 40. The setting is mainly Spring 1917, in Zennor, a coastal village in Cornwall, close to where D.H. Lawrence has settled with his German wife Frieda.
