Beautiful Lies

Synopsis

It is 1887, and London is in turmoil. Grand celebrations are planned for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, but poverty, unemployment and Irish terrorism mean strikes, riots and bomb plots. Maribel Campbell Lowe, the beautiful Chilean wife of an aristocratic Liberal MP, is determined to ignore the troubles and make a name for herself as an artist. But all is not as it seems. As her husband's hunger for justice drives him towards clashes with his Party and, even more dangerously, with the police, Maribel finds her past returning to haunt her. She dreads exposure, but her worst fear seems inevitable when the notorious investigative journalist Alfred Webster starts to take an uncommon interest in her.

Clare Clark's brilliant new novel is set in a London that uncannily presages our own: a Jubilee year marked by economic crisis and riots, presided over by a scandal-mongering popular press. Hilary Mantel has said that Clark is 'one of those writers who can see into the past and help us feel its texture.' Through a riveting story of idealism, pragmatism and love, Beautiful Lies transports us so powerfully into late-nineteenth-century London we can almost taste the soot in the air.