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Published Feb 2012
352 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publication Information
Seven portraits. Seven artists. Seven girls and women reading.
A young orphan poses nervously for a Renaissance maestro in medieval Siena. An artist's servant girl in seventeenth-century Amsterdam snatches a moment away from her work to lose herself in tales of knights and battles. An eighteenth century female painter completes a portrait of a deceased poetess for her lover. A Victorian medium poses with a book in one of the first photographic studios. A girl suffering her first heartbreak witnesses intellectual and sexual awakening during the Great War. A young woman reading in a bar catches the eye of a young man who takes her picture. And in the not-so-distant future a woman navigates the rapidly developing cyber-reality that has radically altered the way people experience art and the way they live.
Each chapter of Katie Ward's kaleidoscopic novel takes us into a perfectly imagined tale of how each portrait came to be, and as the connections accumulate, the narrative leads us into the present and beyond. In gorgeous prose Ward explores our points of connection, our relationship to art, the history of women, and the importance of reading. This dazzlingly inventive novel that surprises and satisfies announces the career of a brilliant new writer.
"Ambitious in range and technically impressive... [Girl Reading] is undoubtedly the work of a writer to watch." - Kirkus Reviews
"A real wow of a first novel… incredibly clever." – The Times (London)
"Book of the Week: Katie Ward's assured debut is inspired by that mysterious and provocative subject of a thousand visual images: a woman reading... In each chapter Ward twists a story around real works of art. Her seven unpredictable tales serve up a lively, irreverent and even feminist journey through history." - Time Out (London)
"Book of the Week: This isn't a novel - it's a time machine! Well, nearly... I guarantee the stories will relate to your own life in some way - if you're planning to pack any holiday books this year, make sure Girl Reading is one of them." - Cosmopolitan (UK)
"Girl Reading is a debut of rare individuality and distinction. Katie Ward inhabits each of her seven scenes, her seven eras, with a fluent and intuitive touch, and sentence by sentence, deft and mercurial, she surpasses the readers' expectations... The writing is full of light and shadow, alive with fresh and startling perceptions." – Hilary Mantel, author of the Man Booker Prize winning Wolf Hall
This information about Girl Reading 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.
Katie Ward was born in Somerset, England in 1979. She has worked in the public and voluntary sectors, including at a women's refuge center, in the office of a Member of Parliament, and in various community-based projects. She lives in Suffolk, England, with her husband and two cats. Visit her online at www.katieward.co.uk.
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