Beautiful Lies - Tapa blanda

In her new book, acclaimed historial novelist Clare Clark picks the colourful world of 1887 London as the backdrop for a novel with intriguing contemporary parallels.

London in 1887. For Maribel Campbell Lowe, the beautiful, bohemian wife of a maverick politician, it is the year to make something of herself. A self-proclaimed Chilean heiress educated in Paris, she is torn between poetry and the new art of photography. But it is soon plain that Maribel's choices are not so simple. As her husband's career hangs by a thread her real past, and the family she abandoned, come back to haunt them both. When the notorious newspaper editor Alfred Webster begins to take an uncommon interest in Maribel, she fears he will destroy not only Edward's career but both of their reputations. Inspired by the true story of a Liberal MP's wife who lived a double life for decades, "Beautiful Lies" is set in a time that, fraught with economic uncertainty and tabloid scandal-mongering, uncannily presages our own. Praised by Hilary Mantel as "one of those writers who can see into the past and help us feel its texture," Clark has created a brilliant, riveting novel of late Victorian England.