Girl Reading

(Paperback)

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Description

An orphan poses nervously for a Renaissance maestro in medieval Siena and an artist's servant girl in seventeenth-century Amsterdam snatches a moment away from her work to lose herself in tales of knights and battles.

A woman reading in a Shoreditch bar catches the eye of a young man who takes her picture and a Victorian medium holds a book that she barely acknowledges while she waits for the exposure.

Reviews

A real wow of a first novel. The premise is alarmingly simple and yet somehow stunning: seven portraits, seven artists, seven girls and women reading... A wonderful, imaginative evocation of seven different worlds... It's very rare for a novel to have a real freshness and originality but at the same time to evoke echoes of other literary memories. This feels incredibly clever. It's a book packed full of adventures and stories and you completely lose yourself in them... This book's great strength: the perfect, separate, involving worlds it creates. Like Mitchell, Ward is equally adept at shifting between completely different registers and voices... It [has] real beating heart... It will be fascinating to see what she writes next. - Viv Groskop, The Times

A debut of rare individuality and distinction. Katie Ward inhabits each of her seven eras with a fluent and intuitive touch, and sentence by sentence, deft and mercurial, she surpasses the reader's expectations. - Hilary Mantel

Author Bio

Katie Ward was born in Somerset in 1979. She has worked in the public and voluntary sectors, including at a women's refuge and for a Member of Parliament. Katie lives in Suffolk with her husband and cat.