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Published Sep 2012
512 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publication Information
London 1887. For Maribel Campbell Lowe, the beautiful bohemian wife of a maverick politician, it is the year to make something of herself. A self-proclaimed Chilean heiress educated in Paris, she is torn between poetry and the new art of photography. But it is soon plain that Maribel’s choices are not so simple. As her husband’s career hangs by a thread, her real past, and the family she abandoned, come back to haunt them both. When the notorious newspaper editor Alfred Webster begins to take an uncommon interest in Maribel, she fears he will not only destroy Edward’s career but both of their reputations.
Inspired by the true story of a politician's wife who lived a double life for decades, Beautiful Lies is set in a time that, fraught with economic uncertainty and tabloid scandal-mongering, uncannily presages our own.
"[An] an informative if disjointed portrait of the Victorian era." - Publishers Weekly
"[An] engaging, compulsively readable window into Victorian society." - Library Journal
"Starred Review. An enthralling novel about an elaborate fiction, Beautiful Lies dazzles with its presentations of late Victorian London's political and social occupations and a remarkable woman with something to hide... An unpredictable, historically authentic take on how we all carry secrets." - Booklist
"A stirring and seductive novel." - The Economist (UK)
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Chris Clark
Clare read History at Trinity College, Cambridge, where she was a Senior Scholar. She graduated with a Double First.
She then spent eleven years in advertising, first at Saatchi & Saatchi and then, as a board director, at Bartle Bogle Hegarty, working both in London and New York.
Her first novel, The Great Stink, was published by Viking in 2005 after a five-way auction: critically acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic, The Great Stink was long-listed for the Orange Prize, won the Pendleton May First Novel award in the UK and the Quality Paperback Book Club New Voices award in the USA. It was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year.
Since then The Great Stink has been translated into five languages. A film of the novel is currently in development.
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