Birdcage Walk: A dazzling historical thriller - Tapa dura

"This is the finest novel Helen Dunmore has written ... From the start, Birdcage Walk has the command of a thriller ... The novel’s cast is marvellous and vivid ... A novel that deserves to be cherished and to last." (Kate Kellaway Observer)

"This powerful novel is a fine final flourish from a gifted writer ... The power Dunmore gives to lowly female lives is inescapably moving, their stories taking us on a remarkable journey into the visceral heart of the female experience in Georgian Britain ... [Dunmore is] one of the bravest and most versatile writers of her generation ... This fine, fiery novel will surely be remembered as one of her best." (Melissa Katsoulis The Times)

"Like many of Dunmore’s novels, Birdcage Walk defies categorisation ... a blend of beauty and horror evoked with such breath-taking poetry that it haunts me still ... she has an extraordinary gift for taking the ordinary and familiar and rendering them new. When Tredevant’s growing unpredictability once more tightens the narrative, forcing the story back into the ominous and unsettling territory where it first began, it is easy to see why [Dunmore] has earned a place among the finest writers of historical fiction working today." (Guardian)

"Helen Dunmore’s quietly brilliant historical novels are among the best fiction of our time." (Jake Kerridge Daily Telegraph)

"A finely wrought psychological thriller ... But it’s ultimately a novel about the ways in which we remember and, as such, a fitting contribution to Dunmore’s extraordinary legacy." (Daily Mail)

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.