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Through the Booker-shortlisted writer comes a sensuous, evocative novel checking out the lives of ladies in Victorian London, for admirers of Sarah Waters, Emma Donoghue and Kate Atkinson. 2011: When Madeleine loses her job as a lecturer, she makes a decision to leave her riverside smooth in cobbled Stew Lane, where history never feels far away, and proceed to Apricot Place. Yet here too, in this calm Walworth cul-de-sac, she senses days gone by encroaching: a moving in the atmosphere, a present of unseen life. 1851: and Joseph Benson has been employed by Henry Mayhew to help research his articles on the working classes. A family man with mouths to nourish, Joseph is tasked with coaxing testimony from prostitutes. Roaming the Southwark avenues, he is lured by brothels' assurances of pleasure - so that as he struggles along with his assignment, he looks for answers in Apricot Place, where the enigmatic Mrs Dulcimer works a boarding house. As these entwined reports unfold, alive with the sensations of London recent and present, the two eras clean against one another - a breathing at Madeleine's neck of the guitar, a words in her brain - the murmurs of ghosts echoing through time. Rendered in immediate, intoxicating prose, The Walworth Beauty is a haunting tale of desire and exploitation, isolation and damage, and the faltering seek out human interconnection; this is Michele Roberts at her masterful best.
