Lily: A Tale of Revenge
by Rose Tremain
Chatto & Windus, £18.99, 288 pages
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Rose Tremain is a prolific and prize-winning author, the recipient of the Whitbread and the Orange Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for the Costa and Booker. She is also an unpredictable one. Her work ranges across time from the Restoration to the present day. Her characters are court musicians, gardeners, translators, immigrants, a child struggling with gender identity. Even when she ventures into that most crowded period for writers of historical fiction, the 19th century, she takes readers to unexpected destinations, to the islands of Borneo or the New Zealand gold fields.
