Girl Reading by Katie Ward
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.
A real wow of a first novelThe 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 scenes, her seven eras, with a fluent and intuitive touch, and sentence by sentence, deft and mercurial, she surpasses the readers' expectations. What is set down on the page has a rich and allusive hinterland, so that the reader's imagination has a space to work, and what is unsaid has its own fascination. The writing is full of light and shadow, alive with fresh and startling perceptions. Ward is wise, poised, and utterly original. Her eye and her words are fresh, as if she is inventing the world. * Hilary Mantel *
This richly textured novel is composed of seven stories inspired by portraits -- Isabel Wolff * The Week *
An impressive debut -- Holly Kyte * Sunday Telegraph *
Intelligently written -- Lesley McDowell * Sunday Herald *
A debut of rare individuality and distinction. Katie Ward inhabits each of her seven scenes, her seven eras, with a fluent and intuitive touch, and sentence by sentence, deft and mercurial, she surpasses the readers' expectations. What is set down on the page has a rich and allusive hinterland, so that the reader's imagination has a space to work, and what is unsaid has its own fascination. The writing is full of light and shadow, alive with fresh and startling perceptions. Ward is wise, poised, and utterly original. Her eye and her words are fresh, as if she is inventing the world. * Hilary Mantel *
This richly textured novel is composed of seven stories inspired by portraits -- Isabel Wolff * The Week *
An impressive debut -- Holly Kyte * Sunday Telegraph *
Intelligently written -- Lesley McDowell * Sunday Herald *
Katie Ward is an author and creative writing lecturer in Suffolk. Her first novel Girl Reading was a Cactus TV Book Club selection and a book of the week on The Oprah Blog. She received the Clarissa Luard Award in 2013 from Hilary Mantel.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781844086870 |
| ISBN 10 | 1844086879 |
| Title | Girl Reading |
| Author | Katie Ward |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Little, Brown Book Group |
| Year published | 2012-01-05 |
| Number of pages | 352 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |