Blue Diary by Alice Hoffman6/27/2023 ![]() ![]() In five fuss-free short stories, Rachel Ingalls wrestles with some age-old emotions – or, as one character puts it, "love, hatred, desire, jealousy. What do you do when your war-correspondent husband starts to sleep with a pretty young woman on his production team? Steal his good-luck charms and make sure you're the first visitor to his hospital bed. During Eyam's quarantine, the three turn to witchcraft, flagellantism and small-time crookery, while Anna, a tad anachronistically, discovers feminism and the joys of gardening.ĭays Like Today, by Rachel Ingalls (Faber & Faber, £7.99, 289pp) The progress of the plague takes a back seat to a triangular love story between Anna, the rector and his wife, Elinor. No stranger to catastrophic subject matter, the Wall Street Journal war correspondent Geraldine Brooks has taken the true story of Eyam as the inspiration for her first novel, narrated by an invented servant girl, Anna Frith. ![]() Within a year, over half of the village's population had perished. That is what lay in store for the inhabitants of the Derbyshire village of Eyam when, in 1665, at the first sign of the pestilence, they took the brave – some would say foolhardy – decision to cut themselves off from the outside world. ![]() ![]() The smell of rotting apples was the first harbinger of plague, followed by the telltale ring of roses under the skin, and a boil behind the head the size of a newborn piglet. Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks (Fourth Estate, £6.99, 310pp) ![]()
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