Celestine

Description

One summer evening in central France, Gillian Tindall went on an errand into a deserted house. There she discovered a cache of letters in various hands, all written to the same woman. In piecing together the life of this extraordinary person, the author rediscovered a vanished village world and a remarkable period in French history. Celestine Chaumette, an innkeeper's daughter, lived from 1844 until 1933. Many changes occurred during her lifetime, but her story has more to do with the persistence of the past than the loss of it, and Gillian Tindall makes use of a number of sources, from archive material to works of literature, to recreate her life and the life of her village.

Gillian Tindall is a master of miniaturist history, well known for the quality of her writing and the scrupulousness of her research; she makes a handful of people, a few locations or a dramatic event stand for the much larger picture, as her seminal book The Fields Beneath, approached the history of Kentish Town, London. She has also written on London's Southbank (The House by the Thames), on southern English counties (Three Houses, Many Lives), and the Left Bank (Footprints in Paris), amongst other locations, as well as biography and prize-winning novels. Her latest book, The Tunnel through Time, traced the history of the Crossrail route, the forthcoming 'Elizabeth' line. She has lived in the same London house for over fifty years.

"[A] modest little book, well on its way to becoming a modern classic." -- John Campbell Independent "Rich, satisfying, warm and utterly vivid" Mail on Sunday "A wonderful book... [Her] history is acutely visual... The book is a masterpiece of miniaturist history" Times Literary Supplement "This is history at its most interesting and compelling" Sunday Express "No other living foreign writer has gone deeper into the psyche of rural France" Observer