Burning Bright

Description

'A visual delight' The Times 'A splendidly vital recreation of Georgian London' Sunday Times 'Tell me, then: would you say you are innocent or experienced?' 1792. Uprooted from their quiet Dorset village to the riotous streets of London, young Jem Kellaway and his family feel very far from home. They struggle to find their place in this tumultuous city, still alive with the repercussions of the blood-splattered French Revolution. Luckily, streetwise Maggie Butterfield is on hand to show Jem the ropes. Together they encounter the neighbour they've been warned about: radical poet and artist William Blake. Jem and Maggie's passage from innocence to experience becomes the very stuff of poetic inspiration...

Tracy Chevalier is the author of four previous novels, including the international bestseller Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Virgin Blue, Falling Angels, and The Lady and the Unicorn. Born in Washington, DC, she moved in 1984 to London, where she lives with her husband and son. She has a website at www.tchevalier.com.

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