I absolutely love historical fiction. But this one somehow didn't work for me. Good, solid writing but the plot didn't really hold my interest.

This one is a DNF for me. I just couldn't get into the story. Thank you for the opportunity to be a reviewer.

I am disappointed after reading this book. I LOVE historical fiction, and this was a time/place not really written about. I was excited to say the least at the prospect of being drawn into a new setting. In the end though, all I can say is *shrug*. The danger of the time (French Revolution) isn't really ever evident, the reader never feels it. The main problem is Tredevant's housing investments are being effected. It's a very bourgeois problem. Although the book is well written with great character development and settings, the story never really goes anywhere.

A woman in 1790s Bristol finds herself torn between her mother’s radical ideas of rebelling against the state and her husband, practical and materialist, who seems to promise security but has secrets of his own.

I really enjoyed the level of authenticity of this historical fiction: the main characters are radicals so it feels modern in its discussion of rights, yet the world of Bristol in the 1790s is drawn so beautifully and accurately, that it feels utterly natural. It contrasts two visions of womanhood – both feminist in their way – a celebrated female writer who pens radical pamphlets, and her daughter’s form of radicalism which is to do servant’s work in her own home, despite her elevated class, and to protect herself from a husband who seems to hold her too tightly. There is a contemporary feel to the feminist issues it raises.

I had high expectations for this after reading Exposure, which has stuck with me as a superb literary thriller. Although the characterisation is excellent, it didn’t hold as much tension as Exposure, and a few times it lagged with the plot, though the excellent writing keeps you turning pages. Recommended as good, atmospheric and well-drawn historical fiction. 

A final note: I was sad to learn that this was Dunmore’s last book: she wrote this while seriously ill and died soon afterwards. A collection of her entire poetry has now been put together in her honour, and that has just come out, too.

I was initially interested in reading this book, however my tastes have shifted and I do not think I will be able to get to it now. Many thanks to the publisher for sending me a digital copy!

Having read Exposure and enjoying it, I wanted to read more from Helen Dunmore.

Birdcage Walk was an enjoyable read. With a gentle pace, a charming setting and interesting characters, it was easy to get swept up in it. Despite the soft nature of the story, there was still a build of tension and a climatic moment where things could go either way. The build-up made it an engaging read and while it was always easy to put it down, you also got drawn into the world and wanted to know how it would end.

Having defended her choice of husband to her family and friends, Lizzie is adamant to only see the good in the man. But she cannot deny things aren’t how they should be and with the secret past of his first wife hanging over them, she has to decide whether she’s prepared to risk her marriage to face the truth.

Lizzie is extremely close to her mother. When she dies in childbirth, Lizzie decides to raise her brother herself, unable to let go of the final link to her mother. In doing so, she opens her eyes to her situation: risks she hadn’t otherwise perceived. To protect Thomas, she has to face what she has always denied – the truth about her husband.

It’s hard to dislike Lizzie, despite her naïve outlook. She doesn’t share the same passions as the rest of her family and doesn’t commit – she will say whatever necessary to appease those around her, especially her husband, Diner. But she rises to the challenge when it comes to Thomas – she learns quickly and finds an inner strength when it comes to protect him.

The plot is ambiguous to explain: it’s focused around finding out what happened to Diner’s first wife, but that is never fully explored. We hear his version but know it may not be the truth.

There were parts of the narration that confused me. It starts off in present day as a man comes across Lizzie’s mother’s name. As he starts exploring, we are introduced to Lizzie’s world. But we never return to him – it worked as an introduction but started a story-arc not fully explored.

When we are given the true version of what happened to Lucie, this again switches narration as she tells it herself. But she has been a mysterious figure shrouded in secrets for the entire book and it was somewhat jarring to suddenly be reading her final moments from her own view point. It would have worked better as a mystery rather than trying to tie everything off but breaking away from the plot in order to do so.

I enjoyed this book. It was an escape, the type of read perfect for a Sunday afternoon. It doesn’t get your heart racing, but draws you into their world. You want them to find their happy ending and you want Lizzie to start standing up for herself rather than accepting everything.

Not a re-read, but enjoyable nonetheless.

I am currently working on expanding our school library's senior section after years of a dismal and uninspiring selection of books that our older readers never checked out.  My job has been to seek out much more diverse, gripping and modern books that will get them into reading by appealing to as broad a range of readers as possible. This really appealed to me because of its fantastic narrative and sense of atmosphere, combined with believable characterisation and its page-turning nature. It's hard to get young people into reading and if the library is not stocking the kind of book that they might grow up to buy as adult readers then we are not really meeting their needs. I can imagine this provoking lots of discussion after finishing it and a long queue of people trying to reserve it as they've heard so much about it. Will definitely be buying a copy and know that it's going to be a very popular choice. An engrossing read that kept me up far too late to finish reading it. It certainly stood out from the other books that I was considering and I look forward to converting more historical fiction fans in future!

I really wanted to love this book, it didn't happen though. I didn	t enjoy as much as I thought I would. To be honest I even felt bored while reading it. Maybe it wasn't the right moment to read it, so I put it back on my tbr to read it again, eventually. To give a bit of a background, the book is set in England at the end of the 18th and early 19th century and it is going to tell the impact of the Frech Revolution on the lives of those people in England.

I generally liked the book, but it was very slow-paced. I also thought that there would be more talk of the French revolution, since it is especially mentioned in the blurb. I do realise that the book is set in the UK, but the Revolution was a major event in Europe and had a lot of impact in the UK too.

“I thought that if my heart were taken out of my body there would be many cuts in it: sharp, distinct, each of them in a different place.”

“America was another pipe dream. I saw clearly now that it was not so easy to step out of the life which held us. No matter how far we went, we would take with us not only our selves but all the ghosts of our lives.”

“There must be love, even if it destroys us.”

“I did not know what breath meant until she died. It was everything that gave quickness and life: it was thought, feeling, animation. Without it there was nothing.”

Helen Dunmore’s last novel before her death in June 2017 combines her trademark poetic lyricism with her skilled art of telling a story and moving a narrative along seamlessly. 

It opens in 1792. Lizzie Fawkes is recently married to John Diner Tredevant. Her ties to her activist mother are still strong though, a woman who has written for justice and the rights of women, publishing them in pamphlets. While she is pulled back toward her mother, her new husband grows increasingly jealous and possessive – in seems only in marriage can we really know a person. Diner is attempting to build a terrace of homes above the Gorge as part of Bristol’s housing boom. But the building is beset with difficulties – and as the difficulties mount so does Diner’s paranoia and fear. Across the channel, France is in the midst of a revolution – and the growl of that dissent reaches Lizzie in her circle. This is a story that encircles many themes – the burgeoning independence of women, the sense of freedom and change in the air, and the danger of a relationship in which not all is as it appears to be. The language is beguiling, pure poetry – even as Dunmore builds tension through the narrative. Highly recommended.

This is a little gem of a book.  Beautifully written from the perspective of a woman living in Bristol during the French Revolution.  Not only is the book an insight into how much British opinion differed at the time, but also a realistic look at how the war across the channel affected the people of Bristol.  The economy reached a standstill and the building along the coastline ceased so that funds could be poured into another war with France.  
Our protagonist is the daughter of a female novelist, who was greatly respected by her peers.  She truly lived but her works are lost to time.  However, the author brings her back to life through the eyes of her daughter.
The love between a mother and daughter is explored, as is the love between a husband and wife.
Elizabeth fought to marry her husband but now, as his business is about to fail, he becomes increasingly possessive and mysterious.  She begins to wonder about him and starts to ask questions about his previous wife who died under mysterious circumstances.
The book is very well written and emotive.  It was realistically told and unique.

This is Helen Dunmore’s last novel and is as beautifully written as her other novels.   In Birdcage Walk we are introduced to financially over-extended builder John Diner .Tredevant and his second wife Lizzie Fawkes whom he has married following the death of his French wife Lucy.  Lizzie trusts her husband and lives a relatively comfortable life alongside her radical mother Julia, step-father Augustus, her old nanny and maid.   As news from the French Revolution reaches them the household undergoes it’s own transformation, leaving Lizzie facing some changes of her own.   Though not my favourite novel by Helen Dunmore the writing is stunning and I hope there may still be un-published material to be released by the publishers.   

Thanks to Netgalley and Grove Atlantic.

This book starts in the present day when a widower finds an inscription in a graveyard dedicated to Julia Fawkes and wants to find out who she was. He visits a museum and finds out she was a writer.
We are then transported back to 1789 and witness a man burying a woman's body.
Fast forward 3 years and we are introduced to the first person narrative that continues for the remainder of the book. Our protagonist is Lizzie, the daughter of Julia Fawkes and her first husband. Lizzie is married to John Diner Tredevant but she comes to discover that there is a mystery surrounding the death of his first wife.
Lizzie encounters tragedy when her mother dies giving birth to the child of her second husband. This thread was fascinating to read as the novel shows that women with brilliant minds were still subject to their husbands and their own biology.
The emotional rollercoaster of grief is interesting as perceived through an eighteenth century mindset. This is particularly poignant as the author Helen Dunmore died shortly after publishing this book so the legacy of women writers was an important topic for her to bring to the attention of the world.
I'll be honest, I had completely forgotten that a body was buried at the start of the book. The ending of the book therefore came as a complete surprise to me!
The opening chapter set me up to expect that more of the plot would be in the present day. However the mystery of Julia Fawkes and her writings did make me go out and read more about her and the little we know. I love reading on my phone/Kindle but it is tricky to look back and find a specific point as you would flick through a paperback.
This book was excellent. The plot and characters were engaging and I loved finding out some of the history surrounding the French Revolution and the radicalisation of the time.

What's it about?

It is 1792 and Europe is seized by political turmoil and violence. Lizzie Fawkes has grown up in a Radical household where each step of the French Revolution is followed with eager idealism. But she has recently married John Diner Tredevant, a property developer who has heavily invested in Bristol’s housing boom, and he has everything to lose from social upheaval and the prospect of war. 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.

But as the French Revolution reaches fever pitch, Lizzie finds herself alone with an increasingly dangerous Diner. 

My thoughts

I don't quite know what to make of this book. I loved the time period, I loved the strength of the female characters, and I loved Dunmore's excellent depiction of coercive control in a marriage. Yet, the story as a whole seemed a little reserved to me. We're left to assume that the reason for Lizzie's clearly doomed marriage is rebellion against her independent and free-thinking mother, but there isn't much to base this assumption on. There's a brief passage on how they met, but the background to the relationship as a whole needed more detail. 

I also found myself getting a little lost in the setting. I've been to Bristol once, and that was such a flying visit that I remember little apart from the motorway seeming very dusty. I know there's a gorge, and a Brunel-built bridge, but this book needs more local knowledge. You need to know how those pieces fit together. There is a lot of affection for the area in this book, and I believe Birdcage Walk is a real place, but it needed more coherence when it came to putting it on the page. 

I did enjoy the passages on the French Revolution, and contemporary political thinking. Dunmore clearly did her research, and what results is a neat incorporation of real events into fiction. Dunmore has form with the exemplary historical novel; have a look at one of her other novels, The Siege, for another. The paragraphs in French did test my rusty GCSE, but it wasn't a stretch to get the gist, and there were often translations woven into the dialogue.

Some parts of the plot didn't quite work for me, either. The mysterious first wife, Lucie, darts in and out, but there's never enough detail to work out why she's so captivating.A sort of Rebecca-lite, if you will. The relationship with Diner needed more detail, as I said above. Is Lizzie utterly smitten or is she just looking for a way out? I've got genuinely no idea. 

On the whole, an accomplished historical novel from an accomplished author. Helen Dunmore died not long after this book came out, I think, and it's rather poignant reading particular passages with hindsight (although the afterword says she was diagnosed after writing this book). It's not her best, but it's still very good and worth a read. 

Would I recommend it?

Yes, I think I would. But I'd also look at her other work too (particular The Siege and Exposure).

Sadly Helen Dunmore died in June 2017 so this was her last novel.
Full of radical feminist idealism, political turmoil and the backdrop of the French Revolution this is perfect for history fans.
Set in Bristol in 1792 the details are really well written and the writing brings the history to life before you eyes with every turn of the pages.
Not my usual kind of book but I am pleased i read it and i would recommend it to anyone who enjoys historical facts and fictions!

Although the general story line is well thought out I found it a struggle when reading this book. It was quite slow paced and even when it reached a climatic point I felt that I knew the end result. There were some lovely moments but all in all sadly, this one wasn't for me.

‘Birdcage Walk’ is the last novel by the incomparable Helen Dunmore who moved between subjects and periods with ease, setting the dramatic minutiae of people’s lives against the huge social events of the time. War, spies and, in ‘Birdcage Walk’, the French Revolution and how its impacts on a family in Bristol.
The novel opens as a walker and his dog discover a hidden grave in the undergrowth of a derelict graveyard. He reads the inscription to Julia Elizabeth Fawkes but subsequent research finds no information about her. This is followed by a short night-time scene in 1789 of a man burying a body in woods. We do not know the location, his identity or that of the body. How are these two things connected? For the first half of the book, I forgot these two short scenes until growing menace made me recall it and read faster.
It is 1792. This is the story of young wife Lizzie Fawkes, new wife of Bristol builder John Diner Tredevant and daughter of writer Julia Fawkes. Diner, as he is known, is developing a grand terrace of houses on the cliffs at Clifton Gorge, a development for which he specifies the best, borrowing against the potential sales. He is not keen on the company kept by his wife’s mother, seeing them as seditious socialists agitating in support of the French revolutionaries. He is aware of the potential cost to England, and his ambitious development, if the trouble in France turns into war. Lizzie is torn between two worlds, loyal to her Mammie and cautious about Augustus, her step-father and political pamphleteer, but aware her husband is under financial pressure. Diner is derided as a capitalist by Augustus and his writer friends. But Lizzie is proud, she chose her husband and remains loyal to him. But that loyalty and her young impressionable love for him are challenged. As news from Paris gets grimmer, Diner’s mood darkens. He must lay off workers, creditors chase payment, and he has night sweats. Insistent that independent Lizzie is his now, that he owns her and everything of hers, he is almost overpowering in his need to keep her close. She begins to fear he is having her followed and so disguises herself as she walks about town, lying about her visits home. And then there is the mystery of Diner’s first wife, Lucie, who died in France but of whom he does not speak. Lizzie fears he still loves Lucie.
This is a gently-written novel about tumultuous times in Europe, when the shadow of the unknown and fear – from the horrors in Paris to Diner’s secrets and his dark brooding nature – cannot be escaped. When the moment to run arrives, will Lizzie recognise it? If she does run, where to and who with? And will she know if she is running towards more danger? This is an expertly-written historical novel, rich in period detail, although the title is mentioned fleetingly and not referred to again.
Read more of my book reviews at http://www.sandradanby.com/book-reviews-a-z/

Gosh I loved this. Elegantly written and so captivatingly entertaining. Highly recommended.

This novel is well-written. Nice descriptive passages with well-developed characters.

However, as others have mentioned, the story moves slowly and is rather boring. While this story is set during the French Revolution, the revolution itself is only addressed through a handful of letters and one first-hand telling. The reason I chose this book was to learn more about the French Revolution. If this is your intent as well, look elsewhere.

“There must be love, even if it destroys us”

Death, fittingly and heartbreakingly stalks the pages of Helen Dunmore’s last book. The author, whose work gave so much pleasure over the years to many, had terminal cancer, and Birdcage Walk would be her final novel.

Birdcage Walk has a slightly curious structure, meant, I think, to take us away from obsession with what happened next, and to keep us aware of where we are heading towards.

A man of today, recently bereaved, looking in some ways for distraction and a way to fill his time, becomes interested in an old gravestone which hints that it belonged to a writer, of whom there is no record. He begins to look at an earlier history of Bristol (the setting of the book) 

The gravestone belonged to a woman who was not just ‘a writer’ but a revolutionary thinker – the time is that of the French Revolution. The narrator of this book is her daughter, Lizzie. Her mother, Julia Fawkes, might almost be another Mary Wollstonecroft, and her second husband, Augustus, another Godwin. Lizzie, though, is not married to a revolutionary poet. Her husband John Diner Tredevant is in his own way a visionary : one ablaze with the idea of building, property and capital.

Dunmore’s book is a book of ideas and ideals, a book of strong and conflicting relationship, and also a thriller – though I suspect the reader will identify quite early where things are heading

Visions of a better society for all based on those heady, revolutionary ideas which rocked the stability of society in this country and in France are set against the ideas of order and security. And the creeping in of doubts as some of the initial idealism of ‘liberté égalité fraternité’ – not to mention sororité - meets the fact that a revolution is rarely bloodless :

“I could not explain it even to myself, that a man might set in motion such a lever and put an end to the world that lived inside another’s head. It seemed so monstrous and yet it could be done so easily. It made killing as simple as pouring a cup of water, There was no danger to the killer, or necessity to wrestle with a fellow creature who would fight for his life as hard as you fought to extinguish it” …….

“Think of it …To kill another human being is like crossing a river by a bridge which is then swept away behind you. You can never go back again”

The central relationship in this book is that between visionary Julia Fawkes and her beloved daughter. Lizzie has fallen for a man who may not be worthy of her, and wants a conventional, obedient wife rather than the free thinker she has been raised to be. This is also a novel about how love can break, as much as make, a person.

“I saw clearly now that it was not so easy to step out of the life which held us. No matter how far we went, we would take with us not only our selves but all the ghosts of our lives.”

The novel is also one which is full of psychological tension. There are several ways an author might choose to create tension, each of which can work well, if properly done. Duncan means the reader, I think, to make the links pretty quickly between a shocking event which is described very early on in the eighteenth century section and who the people involved might be. So it is not the reader and their direct need to know ‘what happens next’ which is the setting on the tension knot. Rather, we are immediately lobbed the ‘something major happened’ in order that we should solve that ‘something’ Our tension is rather for the central character in the book, how they change, what changes them, and how they will make the connections as they come to understand what we already are sure of. It’s an empathetic tension she is creating

One small cavil, but not enough to want to dock a star. The first person narrator of the historical section is not fluent in French. Yet, there is a conversation which takes place entirely in French, where she faithfully can recount everything a French speaking character says, even though she only picks out a couple of forcefully spoken and repeated words (which she asks someone else to translate) I have no problems with the forcefully spoken and repeated words but would defy anyone, spoken to a language which they were pretty lacking fluency in, to be able to make sound and memory sense of it!  A moment which felt inauthentic, and jarred.

Finally, in a poignant afterword, Dunmore explains her fascination with small, hidden lives, and their effect on history, and her intention in this novel – which she began before knowing her own terminal diagnosis

“Only a very few people leave traces in history, or even bequeath family documents to their descendants. Most have no money to memorialise themselves, and lack even a gravestone to mark their existence. Women’s lives, in particular, remain largely unrecorded. But even so, did they not shape the future? Through their existences, through their words and acts, their gestures, jokes, caresses, strength and courage – and through the harms they did as well – they changed the lives around them and formed the lives of their descendants”

I received this as a review copy from Netgalley, and read it during my 2 month reviewing absence. It was with pleasure that I read it again, as I did want to be able to write a review which expressed my pleasure in the book, properly