Cornflower Books

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2021

    Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light has this evening been announced winner of the 2021 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. 

    For a short video featuring the prize founder, the Duke of Buccleuch, and this year's shortlisted writers, click here.

Books in brief: China Court

   

    This is outstanding!

    You might call China Court a palimpsest of a novel: the history of a Cornish country house and its family, layered, interleaved, the past forever colouring the present. It's beautifully, evocatively written, but it's the masterly way Rumer Godden has constructed it that so impresses. In her preface she quotes Chaucer: Life is 'a thinne subtil knittinge of thinges', and such is her skill that she has carried the strands of her story with ease and perfect tension and worked them into a complex, fitting, and very pleasing pattern.

    I'll say no more than to urge you to read it for yourself.

(Edited to add: I've popped a favourite passage over here.)