Burning Bright

by Tracy Chevalier

Flames and funerals, circus feats and seduction, neighbours and nakedness: Tracy Chevalier's new novel ‘Burning Bright’ sparkles with drama.

London 1792. The Kellaways move from familiar rural Dorset to the tumult of a cramped, unforgiving city. They are leaving behind a terrible loss, a blow that only a completely new life may soften.

Against the backdrop of a city jittery over the increasingly bloody French Revolution, a surprising bond forms between Jem, the youngest Kellaway boy, and streetwise Londoner Maggie Butterfield. Their friendship takes a dramatic turn when they become entangled in the life of their neighbour, the printer, poet and radical, William Blake. He is a guiding spirit as Jem and Maggie navigate the unpredictable, exhilarating passage from innocence to experience. Their journey inspires one of Blake's most entrancing works.

Georgian London is recreated as vividly in Burning Bright as 17th-century Delft was in Tracy Chevalier's bestselling masterpiece, Girl with a Pearl Earring.

(From Publisher).

Tracy Chevalier grew up in Washington, DC. She moved to England in 1984, and graduated in 1994 from the MA course in creative writing at the University of East Anglia.Her first novel, The Virgin Blue, was chosen by WH Smith for its Fresh Talent promotion in 1997. In 2000, HarperCollins published Girl with a Pearl Earring, which has gone on to sell over two million copies worldwide. Falling Angels was published to much critical acclaim in 2002, The Lady and the Unicorn, followed in 2004 and Burning Bright has just been published in hardback.The film of Girl with a Pearl Earring, starring Colin Firth as Vermeer, was released in the UK in January. It was nominated for 10 BAFTAs and two Academy Awards.Tracy Chevalier lives in North London with her husband and son.