Beautiful Lies
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  • Published: 6 December 2012
  • ISBN: 9781448178070
  • Imprint: RH AudioGo
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 15 hr 2 min
  • Narrator: Wanda McCaddon

Beautiful Lies

Formats & editions
Audiobook
6 Dec 2012
Paperback
15 Jun 2013
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London, 1887. In a momentous year dogged by economic crisis, riots and a voracious press hungry for scandal - how can one MP's wife bury the truth about her past?

It is 1887, and an unsettled London is preparing for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. For Maribel Campbell Lowe, the beautiful, bohemian wife of a maverick politician, it is the year she plans to make her own mark on the world. But her husband's outspoken views inspire enmity as well as admiration - and the wife of a member of parliament should not be hiding the kind of secrets Maribel has buried in her past. When a notorious newspaper editor begins to take an uncommon interest in her, Maribel fears he will destroy not only her husband's career but both of their reputations.

Beautiful Lies is set in a Jubilee year that, fraught with economic uncertainty, riots and tabloid scandal-mongering, uncannily presages our own. Praised by Hilary Mantel as 'one of those writers who can see into the past and help us feel its texture', Clark has created a brilliant, riveting novel that illuminates both Victorian England and our own times.
  • Published: 6 December 2012
  • ISBN: 9781448178070
  • Imprint: RH AudioGo
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 15 hr 2 min
  • Narrator: Wanda McCaddon
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About the author

Clare Clark

Clare Clark's critically acclaimed novels include The Great Stink and Savage Lands, both longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She is a regular contributor to the Guardian and writes for numerous other publications, both in the UK and the USA. She lives and works in London.

Clare Clark was born in London in 1967. A Senior Scholar at Trinity College Cambridge she graduated with a Double First in History. Her novel, The Great Stink, won the Pendleton May First Novel Award, was shortlisted for the CWA First Novel Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She is married with two children and lives in London.

portrait photo of Clare Clark

Also by Clare Clark

We That Are Left
Savage Lands
See all

Praise for Beautiful Lies

A wonderfully observed novel which explores both the role of women and the tabloid press in Victoria's jubilee year. Completely gripping

Rosie Boycott

Sentences that are so lush, so beautifully finished, that one almost wants to stroke her prose

Judith Flanders, Guardian

A hugely entertaining and generous piece of story-telling

James Walton, Daily Mail

The charm of Beautiful Lies is that Ms Clark breaks the usual Victorian moral code, exploring both the colourful world outside the drawing room and the depths of her characters’ minds. A stirring and seductive novel

The Economist

Beautiful Lies is a dazzlingly elegant novel steeped in the rich detail of the period

Lucy Scholes, Independent

A shining example of historical literary fiction… nothing less than literary pyrotechnics. Beautiful Lies is a dazzlingly elegant novel steeped in the rich detail of the period

Lucy Scholes, Independent

Clark works on a large canvas to tell her story and Beautiful Lies is rich in character, event and period detail, but it is the compelling evocation of its heroine’s predicament that stays in the memory

Nick Rennison, Sunday Times

[A] beautifully crafted piece of Victoriana… a satisfying blend of period melodrama and psychological sharpness

Adrian Turpin, Financial Times

This is a delicious brick of a book, at the high end of historical fiction; immaculately informed, with characters you can’t forget

Kate Saunders, Saga