Beautiful Lies - by Clare Clark (Paperback)

About the Book

From an award-winning novelist described by Hilary Mantel as one of those writers who can see into the past and help us feel its texture, the story of the exotic wife of a Scottish aristocrat who is not what she seems, set against the backdrop of the cultured drawing rooms and emerging tabloid culture of late Victorian London.

Book Synopsis

"Beautiful Lies is set in Victorian Britain; at its center is Maribel Campbell Lowe, the wife of a Scottish M.P. and a self-proclaimed Chilean heiress. But Maribel's life is based on a web of lies, and a newspaperman's uncommon interest in her could prove disastrous" --New York Times Book Review

London 1887. For Maribel Campbell Lowe, the beautiful bohemian wife of a maverick politician, it is the year to make something of herself. She is torn between poetry and the new art of photography. But it is soon plain that Maribel's choices are not so simple. As her husband's career hangs by a thread, her real past, and the family she abandoned, come back to haunt them both. When the notorious newspaper editor Alfred Webster begins to ask pointed questions, she fears he will not only destroy Edward's career but both of their reputations.

From the Back Cover

Clare Clark s fiction manages to maintain historical accuracy even as it indulges in great storytelling and lush prose . . . A captivating fable of truth and memory, Beautiful Lies speaks to us quietly yet with strength. New York Times Book Review
London 1887. For Maribel Campbell Lowe, the beautiful bohemian wife of a maverick politician, it is the year to make something of herself. A self-proclaimed Chilean heiress educated in Paris, she is torn between poetry and the new art of photography. But it is soon plain that Maribel s choices are not so simple. As her husband s career hangs by a thread, her real past, and the family she abandoned, come back to haunt them both. When the notorious newspaper editor Alfred Webster begins to take an uncommon interest in Maribel, she fears he will not only destroy Edward s career but both of their reputations.
Beautiful Lies presents us with a couple who would surely be counted among our Beautiful People today . . . The whole novel is carefully constructed and full of wonderful details about the period. You can see that the Victorian Age is a mirror image of our own. And Edward and Maribel are touching, funny, brave, and sweet. Washington Post
[Clark] is one of those writers who can see into the past and help us feel its texture. Hilary Mantel, Booker Prize winning author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies
CLARE CLARK is the author of three highly acclaimed historical novels: The Great Stink, Savage Lands (both longlisted for the Orange Prize), and The Nature of Monsters. She writes regularly for the New York Times and the Washington Post and lives in London.

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Review Quotes

"Clark's fiction manages to maintain historical accuracy even as it indulges in great storytelling and lush prose. . . . Her central character, Maribel Campbell Lowe, is the beautiful, chain-smoking wife of a radical Scottish M.P. . . . She develops the story gently, with revelations about Maribel's past folded carefully into scenes from the present, yielding a complex tapestry of tales. A captivating fable of truth and memory." -- Andrea Wulf, The New York Times Book Review "Beautiful Lies presents us with a couple who would surely be counted among our Beautiful People today. . . . .The whole novel is carefully constructed and full of wonderful details about the period. You can see that the Victorian Age is a mirror image of our own. And Edward and Maribel are touching, funny, brave, and sweet." -- Carolyn See, The Washington Post "The charm of Beautiful Lies is that Clark breaks the usual Victorian moral code, exploring both the colorful world outside the drawing room and the depths of her characters' minds. A stirring and seductive novel." - The Economist "Clark plays with the ideas of identity and image, while incorporating the Bloody Sunday riots, Buffalo Bill Cody's Will West Show, and the growing interest in Spiritualism. . . .Beautiful Lies takes its time to develop, but its portrait of a woman determined to decide for herself who she is and a society less stable and comfortable than it imagines is a rich one well worth studying." -- The Christian Science Monitor Praise for Clare Clark: "One of those writers who can see into the past and help us feel its texture." -Hilary Mantel, Booker Prize-winning author of Wolf Hall "As a storyteller, Clark is endowed with verve and intelligence, but her larger gift, dazzlingly in evidence throughout both her fine novels, lies in the originality of her imagination. She gives us a world that feels alive and intense, magnificently raw."--New York Times Book Review "Clark's commitment to historical color is matched by the dramatic arc of an engrossing story." --Washington Post "Clare Clark writes with the eyes of a historian and the soul of a novelist." - Amanda Foreman --