Readers' rating:
Published Sep 2016
300 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publication Information
How do you keep the love of the King of France?
1676. In a hovel in the centre of Paris, the fortune-teller La Voisin holds a black mass, summoning the devil to help an unnamed client keep the love of the King of France, Louis XIV. Three years later, Athénaïs, Madame de Montespan, the King's glamorous mistress, is nearly forty. She has borne Louis seven children but now seethes with rage as he falls for eighteen-year-old Angélique de Fontanges. At the same time, police chief La Reynie and his young assistant Bezons have uncovered a network of fortune-tellers and poisoners operating in the city. Athénaïs does not know it, but she is about to be named as a favoured client of the infamous La Voisin.
"I enjoyed it enormously...you brought The Affair flooding back to me with added excellent detail...It really is a remarkable achievement." - Anne Somerset, author The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide, and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV
"This book kept me reading into the night...luxury and squalor, royal scandal and sorcery...how could it not?" - Fay Weldon, author The Life and Loves of a She-devil
This information about Charlatan was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kate Braithwaite grew up in Edinburgh but has lived in various parts of the UK, in Canada and the US. Winner of the University of Toronto Marina Nemat Award and Random House Student Writing Prize, she writes atmospheric historical fiction exploring dark secrets and unusual episodes from the past: the stories no one told you about in history class at school.
Her novel, Charlatan, was long-listed for the Mslexia New Novel Award and the Historical Novel Society Novel Award in 2015.
Kate and her family live in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.
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