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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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GIRL READING

Katie Ward

7 PORTRAITS

The novel shares the structural ambition and range of Adam Thorpe's Ulverton and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days and uses the same deft and surreptitious ways of binding stories together by imagery, characters, objects, references. She has a wonderfully lively imagination, and an extraordinary palette of moods from farce to tragedy, played out using characters stuck in predicaments across 7 centuries, which are also timeless. At the appropriate moments it packs a huge emotional punch.

Girl Reading starts in the 14th century with the commission of a new altarpiece by Simone Martini for Siena cathedral whose subject, controversially, is to be an Annunciation. The model is a girl from the city's orphanage chosen for her holiness, but who is hiding her own secret, and the artist and model grow towards an intimacy that defies the city's politics that swirl around them. Next it moves to Holland in the 17th century, with a maidservant in a well-to-do household who is both resented and indispensible to the household. Her deafness gives extraordinary poignancy to her vulnerability and to her growing emotional attachment to the son of the house, who is to seek his fortune in the East Indies. Rembrandt has a walk-on part, but this has no resemblance to the Girl with the Pearl Earring. The artist Angelica Kauffman is the subject of a story set in 1775, when she returns to a grand country house whose lady is living in seclusion after a terrible society scandal over the outing of her female lover, the subject of Kauffman's unfinished portrait. It is an extraordinary triangle of three women, one dead, and the pressure of grief. Carte de Visite brings back together two sisters, one a famous medium in 1864 when the fashion of visiting the other world and communicating with it is growing apace, and delves into the new technology of photography as well as dramatising the new world of uneasy social mobility. In 1916 we are treated to the opposite of a grand country house party. While the war rages and men are dying in their millions a devoted scholar is piecing together her dead professor's life work, and a disparate group of characters take up temporary residence, bringing their own brand of sexual chaos with them. It is a wonderful mixture of horror and comedy. The most surprising character is perhaps the subject of Immaterialism, a young black political researcher making her way into Tory politics, determined to reinvent herself as a self-made person and at odds with her background. Is she the predator or being preyed on? It is a disconcerting parable about women in the present. Finally we move into the future where almost all human experience is electronically enhanced and synthesised. A mother and daughter yearn to rediscover themselves and defy the insidious world of artifice and instant gratification.

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Book Published 2012-01-05 by Virago

Comments

‘[A] real wow of a first novel…Girl Reading is a wonderful, imaginative evocation of seven different worlds, each linked by the idea of a woman captured – in a portrait, on camera – reading…This is the book’s great strength: the perfect, separate, involving worlds it creates.’

Girl Reading reads as though its author is five books down. She has plunged straight into a series of difficult challenges, her handling of time and place accomplished with authority, skill and knowledge. If the basic idea is simple, reminiscent of the classic writing class exercise in which students are made to produce a tale inspired by an art postcard, the result is a complex showcase for Ward's talents.

Ms. Ward's effort stands out by joining seven stories set across 700 years into what amounts to a panel painting teeming with life.

Ward’s sinuous language wraps around serious ideas concerning sex and love, freedom and power…It’s exciting to imagine what she’ll write next.

‘[Girl Reading’s] breadth is exhilarating…Katie Ward is a sharp observer of the daily realities that continue to circumscribe women’s lives, loves and ambitions

An impressive debut... each vignette is a masterfully drawn miniature.

An exquisitely rendered celebration of women and reading in seven portraits.

This isn’t a novel – it’s a time machine! Each chapter reveals the lives and loves of a different heroine through an image of them reading…if you’re planning to pack any holiday books this year, make sure Girl Reading is one of them.

The women depicted in seven works of art offer glimpses of female-centered worlds across time, in an ingenious British debut… Ward’s style is atmospheric, poetic and dexterous, often exploring interior worlds lit by powerful emotion… undoubtedly the work of a writer to watch.’

[An] assured debut… Her seven unpredictable tales serve up a lively, irreverent and even feminist journey through history.’

‘an intricately woven collection of stories, each centered on an image of a woman holding a book, the first set in the 14th century, the last in the future.’

Ward's style is atmospheric, poetic and dextrous, often exploring interior worlds lit by powerful emotions.

'Girl Reading is a debut of rare individuality and distinction. Katie Ward inhabits each of her seven scenes, her seven eras, with a fluent and intuitive touch, and sentence by sentence, deft and mercurial, she surpasses the readers' expectations. What is set down on the page has a rich and allusive hinterland, so that the reader's imagination has a space to work, and what is unsaid has its own fascination. The writing is full of light and shadow, alive with fresh and startling perceptions. Ward is wise, poised, and utterly original. Her eye and her words are fresh, as if she is inventing the world.'

'Girl Reading by Katie Ward is an inventive debut which takes as its starting point seven portraits of girls and women reading. Every chapter imagines a tale around how each portrait (from Renaissance altarpiece to Victorian photography) came into being. Everything about this book, from concept to execution, feels intelligent and original.'