What Empty Things Are These by Judy Crozier

What Empty Things Are These by Judy Crozier

In 1860s Britain there is nothing unusual in a man beating his wife. When George Hadley's aggression triggers his own stroke and coma, his wife discovers all she thinks of as hers is to pass to her young son Toby. Adelaide seems as powerless as her ladies' maid, Sobriety.Beyond the strictures of domestic and social expectation, these two women of different class remake the rules to discover what lies beneath the drapes and tassels of Victorian Britain. Life, they find, is urgent, exciting but cheap. Even as they adventure into alleyways, a tunnel and a s ance, their innocence is gone.What Empty Things Are These is about what happens to women who look into the face of this newly industrialized and still patriarchal age. Change is everywhere, exhilarating, corrupt, terrifying. Fraud and farce abound. Spiritualists prey on the confused; women are encased in clothing that imply both modesty and sexuality; the powerful prey upon the weak. Adelaide and Sobriety, in their way, show us that every era has secrets that must be uncovered for real social progress.But the truth of the age is encapsulated for them, in the underlying tale of the vulnerable urchin girl, the nameless victim of this pitiless society.

"What Empty Things Are These is an exquisite story of friendship across class, the realisation of self worth, and the delicate emergence of female solidarity in the face of society's disdainCrozier has created a glorious Victorian London that creaks and groans and gasps in its smoky, damp darkness and stifling corsetry. A stunning debut and a triumph of imagination and historical voice." - Alison Goodman, NYT bestselling author of Eon, Eona and The Dark Days Club series. "Elegant, witty and sharply insightful, What Empty Things Are These is a mid-Victorian riff on the intellectual and actual freedom of women - one that cleverly begs the question of what has, and what hasn't, changed today." - Kim Kelly, author of the novels Black Diamonds, This Red Earth, The Blue Mile, Paper Daisies, Wild Chicory and Jewel Sea

J.L.Crozier has been writing for much of her life - from the dramatic thirty-page epic written at the age of 12 (reversing her friends' names so as to give a suitable foreign feel to her characters) to now. In between, she has been a journalist and an award-winning short story writer. She has also been a community worker, local government representative, a creative writing teacher, a singing teacher and a blues singer, an editor of journals and a proof-reader for seven years of the Victoria Government Gazette, in the State of Victoria, Australia. 'I believe you can get less for murder, ' she laughs.Judy had a lot of time to read as a child, living an isolated life in Vietnam of the 60s, where her father was attached to the Australian Embassy in Saigon. She attended a French convent there. By the time her family left, she had read her way through the entire children's section of the British Council Library and halfway through the adult section, beginning with Thackeray and Dickens.She was born in Malaya and also lived in Burma as a small child, where her father was a mining engineer.Her short stories have won awards in competitions in Australia, in Ireland (online) and in the US (also online). For the past few years she has concentrated on novel-writing, having completed a Master of Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. This involved intensive research as well as the first chapters of her novel based in Victorian London.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9781947548121
ISBN 10	1947548123
Titel	What Empty Things Are These
Autor	Judy Crozier
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Paperback
Verlag	Regal House Publishing LLC
Erscheinungsjahr	2018-10-01
Seitenanzahl	330
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.
Hinweis	Nicht verfügbar