From the Women’s Prize Archives.
We’re kicking off a brand new segment on The Bessie Blog with literary agent extraordinare Felicity Blunt. Felicity takes us through her bookshelf, focusing on the titles she particularly loves and why.
This isn’t on my bookshelf but it’s on my ipad! The book oscillates between the days before and after a supervirus that decimates the world’s population. The author pulls off a wonderful balancing act between the minutiae of relationships, love and work pre-virus, which we can all recognise, and the grind of survival post humanity’s near extinction, which we then project ourselves into. Shakespeare endures, thanks to the work of a group of travelling performers and their assorted skills and with it the magic of his plays and the hope of a world capable again of creative sophistication. Her vision for a near future feels scarily prescient.
What can one say about this book that hasn’t already been said, and far more eloquently. Henry VIII’s obsession with a male heir is ultimately the axis on which political collateral and personal ambition spin. Enter Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell whose rude intelligence and almost enlightened understanding of the world stand him apart from the titled and entitled. This book is fantastically researched, shrewdly funny and surprisingly poignant. Read it, it’s follow up Bring Up The Bodies and join the infinite number of people who hungrily await the third installment.
This is the first in the meticulously researched historical crime series featuring the 12th-century medical examiner Adelia Aguilar. I love it for its rich detail, sly humour and the interweaving of real life characters such as Henry II with Franklin’s surly and determined heroine. Adelia is an oddity, a Salerno trained female doctor and one who specializes in autopsies. A champion for her victims she is terribly vulnerable in an era of religious superstition extreme beliefs. Franklin’s descriptions of Henry II are as delicious as Mantel’s of Cromwell. Franklin also wrote historical fiction under her real name Diana Norman and each is a joy.
A series of interlocking stories in which Egan plays with time, tense, relationships and voices to create a symphony of unequalled delights. We encounter characters in their adult maturity and then slide back to their infancy and your heart breaks for what they don’t yet know. The American music industry is the back-drop and Egan’s characters ricochet off it and each other, and all the while we feel the underlying connectedness of relationships and love.
Another book that plays with time, but in this novel the author recasts the life of her main character Ursula again and again and again. She might die the day she is born, or in Germany with a child during the Second World War, or patrolling London streets during the Blitz. Through the kaleidoscope of possibilities and the exploration of relationships, chance encounters and familial obligation we enjoy a life like no other. Who hasn’t wondered about the path not taken.
