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Sunday, 27 February 2022

Tracy Chevalier Historical Fiction novels

 Tracy Chevalier's bio 


A single Thread Read some pages here

A Single Thread

(2019) Single woman carves out a place for herself among bells and embroidered cushions in Winchester Cathedral





At the edge of the orchard (2016) read some fragment here

At the Edge of the Orchard by Tracy Chevalier | Goodreads

This is an intense story of a married couple, Sadie and James Goodenough, and their children who settled in the swamps of Ohio in 1838. James has a love of apples and struggles with the muddy swampland to grow an apple orchard. He buys his seeds and saplings from none other than Johnny




The last runaway (2013) read some pages here

About The last runaway

Honor Bright, a modest English Quaker, moves to Ohio in 1850--only to find herself alienated and alone in a strange land. Sick from the moment she leaves England, and fleeing personal disappointment, she is forced by family tragedy to rely on strangers in a harsh, unfamiliar landscape.



Remarkable creatures (2009) read some pages here

and you can also listen to a sample there


Remarkable Creatures is the story of Mary Anning, who has a talent for finding fossils, and whose discovery of ancient marine reptiles such as that ichthyosaur shakes the scientific community and leads to new ways of thinking about the creation of the world.




Burning bright (2007) read a sample here and listen to a sample reading too

Reading group guide with discussion questions

About Burning bright

London 1792. The Kellaways move from familiar rural Dorset to the tumult of a cramped, unforgiving city. They are leaving behind a terrible loss, a blow that only a completely new life may soften. Against the backdrop of a city jittery over the increasingly bloody French Revolution, a surprising bond forms between Jem, the youngest Kellaway boy, and streetwise Londoner, Maggie Butterfield. Their friendship takes a dramatic turn when they become entangled in the life of their neighbour, the printer, poet and radical, William Blake. He is a guiding spirit as Jem and Maggie navigate the unpredictable, exhilarating passage from innocence to experience. Their journey inspires one of Blake's most entrancing works.



The lady and the unicorn read a sample here

Rich tapestry


Musée national du Moyen Âge

The Lady and the unicorn  

Nicolas des Innocents, a handsome, lascivious artist, is summoned to the Paris home of Jean Le Viste, a nobleman who wants Nicolas to design a series of battle tapestries for his house. Jean's wife, Geneviève, persuades Nicolas to talk her husband into a softer subject: the taming of a unicorn by a noblewoman.

Falling Angels (2001) read a sample here

In her New York Times bestselling follow-up, Tracy Chevalier once again paints a distant age with a rich and provocative palette of characters. Told through a variety of shifting perspectives- wives and husbands, friends and lovers, masters and their servants, and a gravedigger's son-Falling Angels follows the fortunes of two families in the emerging years of the twentieth century.

This novel opens at Highgate Cemetery, London's premiere burial ground for the top bourgeoisie. The meeting of the three characters there will dominate the rest of their lives. The Girl With a Pearl Earring was Chevalier's previous novel.




Girl with a pear earring read a sample here 

Girl with a Pearl Earring centers on Vermeer's prosperous Delft household during the 1660s. When Griet, the novel's quietly perceptive heroine, is hired as a servant, turmoil follows. First, the 16-year-old narrator becomes increasingly intimate with her master.


Readinggroupguides discussion questions



Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier is a sharp, sensitive and absorbing novel of 17th century Netherlands, combining history art and fiction. The remarkable author Tracey Chevalier fleshes out and embellishes the story who the girl in the painting by Johannes Vermeer could be.



The Virging Blue read a sample here


Meet Ella Turner and Isabelle du Moulin—two women born centuries apart, yet bound by a fateful family legacy. When Ella and her husband move to a small town in France, Ella hopes to brush up on her French, qualify to practice as a midwife, and start a family of her own. Village life turns out to be less idyllic than she expected, however, and a peculiar dream of the color blue propels her on a quest to uncover her family’s French ancestry. As the novel unfolds—alternating between Ella’s story and that of Isabelle du Moulin four hundred years earlier—a common thread emerges that unexpectedly links the two women. Part detective story, part historical fiction, The Virgin Blue is a novel of passion and intrigue that compels readers to the very last page.

Genres Historical Fiction Fiction Historical France

In split-narrative fashion, it follows a transplanted American woman in southwestern France as she connects through dreams with her distant Huguenot ancestors. The primary plot concerns the plight of Ella Turner, an insecure American midwife of French ancestry.




Tracy Chevalier




Saturday, 5 February 2022

The bone people by Keri Hulme

The bone people

In 1984, the novel won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction.[60] The following year it won the Pegasus Prize for Literature, which that year had been earmarked for Māori fiction,[10] and subsequently became the first New Zealand novel and first debut novel to win the Booker Prize.[61][62][39]



 Who was Keri Hulme? 

died in December 2021








Booke Prize video




Booker club: The Bone People by Keri Hulme ( The Guardian)