She was the author of 12 novels, three books of short stories, numerous books for young adults and children and 11 collections of poetry. And that is most poignant as although at the time she was writing the book Helen Dunmore didn’t know it she was seriously ill and she died earlier this year.
It’s historical fiction, although I think it’s mainly a meditation on death and the legacy we leave behind. This is Helen Dunmore’s last book, but the first one of hers I’ve read, although Exposure is sitting in my Kindle waiting to be read. Weaving a deeply personal and moving story with a historical moment of critical and complex importance, Birdcage Walk is an unsettling and brilliantly tense drama of public and private violence, resistance and terror from one of our greatest storytellers. She belongs to him: law and custom confirm it, and she must live as he wants-his passion for Lizzie darkening until she finds herself dangerously alone. Tormented and striving Diner believes that Lizzie’s independent, questioning spirit must be coerced and subdued. Soon his plans for a magnificent terrace built above the two-hundred-foot drop of the Gorge come under threat. But she has recently married John Diner Tredevant, a property developer who is heavily invested in Bristol’s housing boom, and he has everything to lose from social upheaval and the prospect of war. Lizzie Fawkes has grown up in Radical circles where each step of the French Revolution is followed with eager idealism. It is 1792 and Europe is seized by political turmoil and violence.
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