Tracy Chevalier
Список книг автора Tracy ChevalierThe Lady and the Unicorn
‘Enormously enjoyable’ Evening Standard‘Charming’ The Times‘What would you have me paint instead of a battle, Madame?’ Geneviève de Nanterre’s eyes gleamed. ‘A unicorn.’Keen to demonstrate his new-found favour with the King, rising nobleman Jean le Viste commissions six tapestries to adorn the walls of his château. He expects soldiers and bloody battlefields. But artist Nicolas des Innocents instead designs a seductive world of women, unicorns and flowers, using as his muses Le Viste’s wife Geneviève and ripe young daughter Claude.In Belgium, as his designs spring to life under the weavers’ fingers, Nicolas is inspired once more – by the master weaver’s daughter Aliénor and her mother Christine. They too will be captured by his threads.
Remarkable Creatures
‘A stunning story’ Guardian‘Vivid and engrossing’ Financial TimesI don’t remember there ever being a time when I weren’t out upon beach. Mam used to say the window was open when I was born, and the first thing I saw when they held me up was the sea.Mary Anning may be young and uneducated, but she has “the eye”. Scouring the windswept Jurassic coast near Lyme Regis, she find the fossils nobody else can, making discoveries that will shake the scientific world of the early 19th century. But science is a male-dominated arena, and there are many who disapprove…She finds an unlikely champion in prickly Elizabeth Philpot: unmarried, middle-aged and middle class, and a fellow fossil enthusiast. If they can weather differences in their age and standing, and overcome professional envy, will true friendship prove the rarest find of all?
The Last Runaway
‘Addictively compelling’ The Times‘A joy to read’ Maggie O’FarrellAs she watched, the darkness unfolded itself, stood and took the shape of a young black woman, barefoot, in a yellow dress. Now Honor must actually do something, though she did not yet know what.Honor Bright is a sheltered Quaker who has rarely ventured out of 1850s Dorset when she impulsively emigrates to America. Opposed to the slavery that defines and divides the country, she finds her principles tested to the limit when a runaway slave appears at the farm of her new family. In this tough, unsentimental place, where whisky bottles sit alongside quilts, Honor befriends two spirited women who will teach her how to turn ideas into action.
At the Edge of the Orchard
'A wonderful book; rich, evocative, original. I loved it' Joanne Harris“One in ten trees comes up sweet…”In the inhospitable Black Swamp of Ohio, the Goodenough family are barely scratching out a living. Life there is harsh, tempered only by the apples they grow for eating and for the cider that dulls their pain. Hot-headed Sadie and buttoned-up James are a poor match, and Robert and his sister Martha can only watch helplessly as their parents tear each other apart. One particularly vicious fight sends Robert out alone across America, far from his sister, to seek his fortune among the mighty redwoods and sequoias of Gold Rush California. But even across a continent, he can feel the pull of family loyalties…
A Single Thread
FROM THE GLOBALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING ‘Bittersweet … dazzling’ Guardian ‘Deeply pleasurable … the ending made me cry’ The Times ‘Told with a wealth of detail and narrative intensity’ Penelope Lively It is 1932, and the losses of the First World War are still keenly felt. Violet Speedwell, mourning for both her fiancé and her brother and regarded by society as a ‘surplus woman’ unlikely to marry, resolves to escape her suffocating mother and strike out alone. A new life awaits her in Winchester. Yes, it is one of draughty boarding-houses and sidelong glances at her naked ring finger from younger colleagues; but it is also a life gleaming with independence and opportunity. Violet falls in with the broderers, a disparate group of women charged with embroidering kneelers for the Cathedral, and is soon entwined in their lives and their secrets. As the almost unthinkable threat of a second Great War appears on the horizon Violet collects a few secrets of her own that could just change everything… Warm, vivid and beautifully orchestrated, A Single Thread reveals one of our finest modern writers at the peak of her powers.
