Birdcage Walk by Helen Dunmore

Like many of Dunmore’s novels, Birdcage Walk defies categorisation a blend of beauty and horror evoked with such breathtaking poetry that it haunts me still she has an extraordinary gift for taking the ordinary and familiar and rendering them new. When Tredevant’s growing unpredictability once more tightens the narrative, forcing the story back into the ominous and unsettling territory where it first began, it is easy to see why [Dunmore] has earned a place among the finest writers of historical fiction working today.