
But even so, did they not shape the future?” Agent: Caradoc King, United Agents. Dunmore has left readers with memorable, fascinating characters, both historical and fictional, “whose struggles and passions have been hidden from history. As her husband’s debts overwhelm them, Lizzy’s very life is threatened and John unravels into desperation. Birdcage Walk is not a novel in the form of a diary, a memoir, a letter or an internal monologue Lizzie’s voice comes out of the air.


There’s no device or subtext to her story. As the revolution in France comes to its frenzied zenith, Tredevant’s creditors balk, and his project for a terrace of houses in Bristol collapses. The New York Times Book Review Lizzie Fawkes is a nave young woman, but she’s not a nave narrator. Lizzy and her mother are very close when tragedy visits Julia’s household, Lizzy is left with an enormous responsibility. He also resents Lizzy’s susceptibility to the influence of her mother and Julia’s entourage of English radicals. The willful Lizzy has married John Diner Tredevant, an ambitious builder with a dark past, who is hostile to the new political ideas making their way to England from Paris, ideas he believes may destroy his business prospects.

Dunmore then leads the reader back 200 years to the cover-up of a murder, and then to Lizzy Fawkes Tredevant-daughter of the aforementioned Julia, raised among radicals in the English city of Bristol during the tumultuous period of the French Revolution. This brilliant novel from the late Dunmore addresses the very issues with which all authors must grapple: What does one leave behind as a writer? What is the mark writers leave upon time? The layered story begins with a man coming across the 18th-century headstone of Julia Elizabeth Fawkes, inscribed, “Her Words Remain Our Inheritance.” But no record of her writing survives.
