HISTORICAL FICTION: LINDA DIEBEL
THE TAXIDERMIST’S DAUGHTER By Kate Mosse Orion, $22.99, 288 pages
Kate Mosse begins The Taxidermist’s Daughter in April 1912, on the Eve of St. Mark in a church graveyard in the Sussex coast village of Fishbourne. On this night, superstitious villagers wait to see the ghosts of people destined to die over the coming year. But when the church bell tolls for midnight, there’s only the rush of imprisoned birds flying wildly out of the church and smashing against the gravestones.
The taxidermist’s daughter, Constantia Gifford, 22, stands hidden in the gloom searching for her father and a past she can’t remember. The mood is foreboding and the reader can almost hear the Hitchcockian shrieks of birds. Near their small, scattered bodies, a murdered woman lies dead.
There’s growing horror as Connie sets out to solve the murder and has flashbacks of her own life. What did she see as a little girl? Vincent Price could dictate her story with its many secrets, shadowy figures and hints of an unspeakable act.
She works in her father’s crumbling workshop, cutting into the bodies of dead birds for a trade that has gone out of fashion since Victorians placed stuffed creatures in their drawing rooms. Once, her father had a successful taxidermy business, but he has turned into a haunted wreck of a man admonishing her not to remember the past. Blood, skin, bones. Mosse, bestselling author of The Winter
Ghosts and Labyrinth, is a master of suspense. She weaves dread, romance and electrifying scenes as Connie begins to remember the little girl with a yellow ribbon in her hair — and what she saw.
The author grew up in Fishbourne and describes the book as “my love letter (albeit a gothic one) to home.” She writes about visiting a taxidermy museum and seeing a tableau on the death and burial of cock robin. Her favourite display, it was the beginning of her “fascination — obsession — with taxidermy.”
GUTENBERG’S APPRENTICE By Alix Christie HarperCollins, 404 pages, 24.99
In the mid-1400s, the invention of the printing press led to the same fears about rapid change as the digital revolution of our own age.
Author Alix Christie imagines how it must have been in Gutenberg’s Appren
tice, which she tells readers is “the real story of the three men who made the first printed book.” She recreates a rich drama involving inventor Johann Gutenberg, financier Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer, a young scribe brought into Gutenberg’s workshop as an apprentice.
Schoeffer’s artistry “is thought to have created the breathtaking masterpiece that is the Gutenberg bible.”
Some 30 years later in 1485, Schoeffer narrates his story at Sponheim Abbey in Germany. By then, he is a wealthy man and a master in his own right. He was the first publisher and founder of the Frankfurt Book Fair, still one of the publishing world’s most important events. He understands that history is made by those “whom time and fate have left standing” and has decided he must stake his own claim.
His account is full of intrigue, jealousy and betrayal as he struggles to work for the overbearing Gutenberg until the final dramatic break. His life moves from Paris to medieval Germany in the age of the Holy Roman Empire.
Christie apprenticed to two master printers in California (one her grandfather) and understands the craft. She presents medieval fears of the printing press with a modern sensibility.
For Schoeffer, the idea of a printed Bible meant “the word of God was reduced to that crude, soulless type.”
Gradually, however, he understands that art can blend with commerce. In an age in which everything he knew was coming to an end, there could still be beauty in the new art that he mastered to produce a new and accessible Bible.
Linda Diebel is a journalist and non-fiction author.