A breathtaking, evocative, and stormy tale set in the early 1790’s, just as the fallout from the French Revolution was spilling over into life in Britain. Lizzie Fawkes, daughter of a radical thinker and writer, has settled in Bristol and married a property developer, a man who has the vision to see a parade of buildings in the air, yet fights inner demons. Can Lizzie find her voice as an uncertain life rattles the caged bars of her husband’s will? Helen Dunmore creates a dark and intimate tale within a momentous time, a tense foreboding hovers and slowly sinks over the story, a feeling of inevitability steals across the pages. The writing, through the beautifully detailed description, transported me to the banks of the gorge, to the terrace as it grew out of the mud, to the general everyday life of the time. ‘Birdcage Walk’ is a captivating tale, at times sinister and eerie, yet hope flutters free and somehow manages to keep afloat. ~ Liz Robinson
It is 1792 and Europe is seized by political turmoil and violence. Lizzie Fawkes has grown up in Radical circles where each step of the French Revolution is followed with eager idealism. But she has recently married John Diner Tredevant, a property developer who is heavily invested in Bristol's housing boom, and he has everything to lose from social upheaval and the prospect of war. Soon his plans for a magnificent terrace built above the two-hundred-foot drop of the Gorge come under threat. Diner believes that Lizzie's independent, questioning spirit must be coerced and subdued. She belongs to him: law and custom confirm it, and she must live as he wants. In a tense drama of public and private violence, resistance and terror, Diner's passion for Lizzie darkens until she finds herself dangerously alone.
Helen Dunmore was the author of fourteen novels. Her first, Zennor in Darkness, explored the events which led to D H Lawrence’s expulsion from Cornwall (on suspicion of spying) during the First World War. It won the McKitterick Prize. Her third novel, A Spell of Winter, won the inaugural Orange Prize, now the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction. Her bestselling novel The Siege, set during the Siege of Leningrad, was described by Antony Beevor as ‘a world-class novel’ and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year and the Orange Prize.
Helen Dunmore’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages and she was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She died in June 2017.
