Mrs Pearcey

"I was sent Mrs Pearcey as a proof, and at the moment I am so busy, I can hardly ever seem to find a moment to read – for a book to get read, it has to grab me fast and hard, or I accidentally put it down and never pick it up again. I read Mrs Pearcey in only a couple of days, and was seduced by the freshness of the style. It feels so brilliantly of its period, yet somehow modern and hugely engaging. It also manages to be true crime, while exploring what true crime means, which is just the sort of clever, thoughtful historical writing that I love. Moggach is such a thoughtful writer, and there’s a real elegance to how she handles this true story and her personal links to it. It’s never obvious, never sensationalist, and always beautifully subtle, even while wrangling with the horrors of Victorian crime. To my shame, I haven’t read The Suspicions of Mr Whicher . I don’t know enough about the difference between these two genres to be able to speak with much authority. All I would say from my own experience is that for me the best historical novels lift history into something beyond itself, into thoughtful explorations of the human condition, into something that both transports us into the past but also shows us ourselves in relation to not just its facts but its feeling. A novel, for me, draws meaning out explicitly, and shows it to me, and everything that is included in it is deliberately chosen by the writer to show me something more than just the facts themselves – so that I am left asking questions of myself, rather than simply informed or educated. It’s a three-way symbiosis between reader, writer and the past."