Frankie recommends... Gentle Things - Danielle Giles

Join us for a conversation with Danielle Giles about her new novel Gentle Things - Wednesday 16 September, 7.30pm. Get your tickets here.

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Frankie says... Sarah Waters x Lucy Rose. How strange, how gothic, how unnerving!! Seventeenth century London is brought to shimmering, stinking life from one of the new masters of historical fiction. Danielle Giles blends madness and medicine in this creepy tale of secrets, manipulation and disguise. Who can Lucy trust after her new marriage? Who's voice can she hear in her head? Why has her new husband locked her in...?

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The plague has passed, the fire has cooled, and Lucy North is in desperate need of a husband... From the acclaimed author of Mere comes a thrilling new tale of medicine, marriage and madness set in seventeenth-century London.

London, 1668. Though the streets hum with promise following the restoration of the crown, Lucy North is trapped. Her father’s recent death has left her mother saddled with debts she cannot pay. Lucy must marry the first man willing to take her without a dowry. So when she meets Thomas Ashwell, a young and charming apothecary, Lucy quickly identifies an attractive route out.

She falls in love easily, and when Thomas proposes she believes her future is finally secured. But when Lucy falls and injures her head during their wedding party, things start to warp. Confined to her bedroom her dreams refuse to leave her at daybreak, and the voice in her head no longer sounds like her own. As Thomas plies her with tinctures and cures, a creeping fear takes root: Has this marriage saved her? Or will it bring about her end?