From the bestselling author of ‘Eats Shoots & Leaves’, an unexpectedly moving, luminously wise and brilliantly funny novel about a Victorian Poet Laureate.
In July 1864, a corner of the Isle of Wight is buzzing with literary and artistic creativity. A morose Tennyson is reciting ‘Maud’ to empty sofas; the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron is white-washing the roses for visual effect and the mismatched couple, actress Ellen Terry and painter G. F. Watts, are thrown into the company of the remarkable Lorenzo Fowler, the American phrenologist, and his daughter Jessie. Enter mathematician Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), known to Jessie as the ‘fiendish pedagogue’, and Lynne Truss’s wonderfully imaginative cocktail of Victorian seriousness and riotous farce begins to take flight.
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This is a genuinely funny book that is also smart, clever and just sympathetic enough. I read this when I was low and unwell and it made me feel so much better and I still re-read it when I feel low. It's compact and well written and just a great deal of fun.
