January 1901, the day after Queen Victoria’s death: Two families visit neighboring graves in a fashionable London cemetery. One is decorated with a sentimental angel, the other an elaborate urn. The Waterhouses revere the late Queen and cling to Victorian traditions; the Colemans look forward to a more modern society. To their mutual distaste, the families are inextricably linked when their daughters become friends behind the tombstones. And worse, befriend the gravedigger’s son.
As the girls grow up and the new century finds its feet, as cars replace horses and electricity outshines gas lighting, Britain emerges from the shadows of oppressive Victorian values to a golden Edwardian summer. It is then that the beautiful, frustrated Mrs Coleman makes a bid for greater personal freedom, with disastrous consequences, and the lives of the Colemans and the Waterhouses are changed forever.
Inspiration
Not far from my home in London is Highgate Cemetery, a famous Victorian burial ground. It includes the graves of Karl Marx, George Eliot and Christina Rossetti, as well as more modern luminaries such as George Michael and Douglas Adams. It was once extremely well maintained, a supreme example of Victorian funerary architecture. But after World War I it went into a state of decline it has never fully recovered from. After going on a tour, I fell in love with the cemetery’s decaying gothic atmosphere. I decided to set a novel there, exploring the transition from a religious, death-obsessed society to a more modern era where religion is losing its power and death is no longer celebrated. I began to imagine two families with graves side by side who embody these different traditions, and how they navigate that change.
Reviews
Writing about the past — especially this much written-about period — has its pitfalls, but Chevalier has triumphantly avoided them. The result is a novel that shows both the strangeness of the world as it was and its closeness to our own time. —Times (London)
This is Chevalier’s singular gift: through the particular perspectives of a few finely drawn characters, she is able to evoke entire landscapes. —New York Times
Chevalier has a gift for deftly integrating masses of historical detail into her fiction, and here she includes Victorian mourning ritual, the technicalities of gravedigging and the tentative emergence of modern decorative taste. —Washington Post
Chevalier skilfully evokes the social differences between the self-assured, faintly pretentious Colemans, and the Waterhouses…She handles the social comedy of these ill-assorted neighbours deftly. —Sunday Times (London)
The author’s grip on the reader is as powerful as in her first novel. It is almost impossible to break off reading this driving narrative. —Independent
Chevalier’s ringing prose is as radiantly efficient as well-tended silver. —Entertainment Weekly
