Who’ll claim a drowned girl?
ONCE UPON A RIVER by Diane Setterfield (Doubleday £12.99, 432pp) ONE winter’s night in the mid-19th century, drinkers at the Thameside Swan Inn, known for its storytelling gatherings, are taken by surprise when a stranger bursts into their midst, carrying a drowned child.
They are more shocked when the ‘dead’ child recovers. How is this possible? Who is she and why is she mute? The Vaughans, whose daughter was kidnapped years earlier, believe she is theirs; the Armstrongs pray she is their illegitimate granddaughter, while Lily White longs for her to be her lost sister. Who is right?
The sustaining consolations of the story lie at the heart of this novel. Once settled to the different characters and their points of view, I found there were many to be had in a bold, gripping narrative which fuses science, mystery and myth. BLACKBERRY & WILD ROSE by Sonia Velton (Quercus £14.99, 416pp) IN 1768 country-bred Sara Kemp travels to London but, like many an innocent before her, is hoodwinked into working as a whore.
Meanwhile, in Spitalfields, Esther Thorel, the respectable wife of a master silk weaver, secretly yearns to design the patterns for the silks — an impossible ambition for a woman then.
The two meet when Esther is distributing bibles to the poor. Sara begs Esther to rescue her, which Esther does, and both women find themselves caught up in the increasing hostilities between the weaving hierarchies which threaten both their futures.
For all its colour and elegance, 18th-century London was an unforgiving society: hierarchical, cruel and indifferent to suffering.
This gritty reality is deftly conveyed through the prism of the weavers’ world along with a touching and unsentimental love story.
BLOOD & SUGAR by Laura Shepherd-Robinson (Mantle £16.99, 448pp) PROFITS from slavery were so staggering that the battle for its abolishment was vicious. Could it be, then, that a financial imperative was behind the murder of Thaddeus Archer, barrister and known anti-slaver, in Deptford Dock in 1781? His friend Captain Harry Corsham, war hero and a promising member of Parliament, intends to find out.
Harry’s ambitious society wife, Caro, warns that he will jeopardise his career and, as he unravels far-reaching corruption and vested business interests, his own secrets threaten to surface.
Deptford, a gateway to and from Britain’s expanding empire, is evoked in pungent detail. The British slave trade was an appalling episode in our history and the novel is unflinching in its refusal to sentimentalise motives or to row back on the savagery of the times.