Deborah Swift
Autore di The Lady's Slipper: A Novel
Sull'Autore
Fonte dell'immagine: Photo by Jonathan Bean
Serie
Opere di Deborah Swift
Opere correlate
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Altri nomi
- Blake, Davina
- Data di nascita
- 1955-09-02
- Sesso
- female
- Nazionalità
- England
UK - Organizzazioni
- Historical Novel Society, Romantic Novelists Association
- Premi e riconoscimenti
- Shortlisted for the Impress Prize for Fiction
- Agente
- Annette Green
- Breve biografia
- I live in a small village in the English Lake District. I read widely - contemporary as well as classic fiction, but write historical novels. I share my house with my husband and two cats, and enjoy walking and swimming and tai chi as an antidote to sitting at my desk!
Utenti
Recensioni
Premi e riconoscimenti
The Fortune Keeper: A gripping historical novel of Renaissance Italy (Italian Renaissance Series) (Gold Medal – Renaissance – 2023)
The Silkworm Keeper: A captivating historical novel of Renaissance Italy (Gold Medal – Early Modern – 2022)
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Autori correlati
Statistiche
- Opere
- 28
- Opere correlate
- 1
- Utenti
- 499
- Popolarità
- #49,589
- Voto
- 3.9
- Recensioni
- 67
- ISBN
- 62
- Preferito da
- 1
Not that we are starting from scratch. Several characters and incidents from the previous books feature crucially in the plot. Although The Fortune Keeper works as a standalone novel it would benefit a lot from a brief summary of the key points of the earlier books to guide any new readers.
So what does The Fortune Keeper offer? Firstly, a wonderful view of Renaissance Venice. I don’t know a lot about Venetian history but I found Swift’s Venice completely convincing. It’s rich but decadent. The palaces are already crumbling; the tides regularly flood houses and businesses. It’s a city where corruption runs deep. There are gamblers and whores everywhere (though Swift resists the temptation to titillate with sex). We are in the Renaissance, so Mia is able to go to lectures on astronomy. There are new and better telescopes, but they are as often used to produce more precise horoscopes than to research the heavens. Some people are pointing out that the earth moves round the sun but the Inquisition are busy and awful penalties await those who dismiss the Church’s cosmology too openly.
We follow Mia through marketplaces, into silk workshops, on visits to an old astrologer and on and off gondolas and the Venetian equivalent of buses, traghettos, larger vessels that run to timetables. Life is governed by those traghetto timetables and the state of the tides and, as Giulia and her family live in the Jewish ghetto, by the times that the ghetto gates are locked.
There’s a little about the Jews, tolerated because they were the city’s bankers but not really trusted. (Apparently the Venetians were 300 years ahead of the Nazis when it came to making Jews wear yellow badges on their coats.) We learn, too, about the guild system among gondoliers, but this isn’t an essay on Venetian society. It’s a thriller and a romance, starting slow but building up to a dramatic and bloody climax. And, like all the best thrillers, it has a wonderful villain. The man is a fraud, a swindler and a serial killer – but he does have style.
The climax is, perhaps, a little rushed. It’s a bit like those movies where people move in the shadows, shots ring out, the villain collapses and the hero stands over him as the credits roll. Personally, I prefer the Lee Child approach to violent denouements. I want the hero to feint with his left and lead with his right and only as he lies helpless (some blackguard probably hit him from behind) does he draw the pistol concealed in his boot and bring the villain down. Maybe that’s just me but I think that if you are doing the big fight scene, go all in or go home.
Since I wrote this, I’ve read Swift’s latest, The Silk Code, where the fight scenes match anything Lee Child has done, so I’ve no idea why this one didn’t work for me. It’s quite a minor quibble in any case. The important thing is that mysteries are solved. Some relationships are cleared up (no spoilers), others not. Life moves on. As do Mia and Guilia. It will be interesting to see where Ms Swift takes them next.… (altro)