Novels
Novels
The Circus of Ghosts - The Fraud - The Mesmerist - Rosetta - The Trespass - A Dangerous Vine - The Actresses
THE CIRCUS OF GHOSTS
New York, late 1840': an exciting brazen, loud young city exploding with new money and new people and new ideas: the telegraph, the daguerreotype, anaesthesia, spiritualism, occultism, table-tapping. And in Silas P. Swift's brash and beautiful circus a mother and daughter hide their damaged hearts and excite huge audiences in the big top: one shadowy mesmerist who can heal other people (but not herself); the other an acrobat and tightrope-walker who soars above New York.
But in London memories fester in the mind of an old and vicious duke of the realm who plots with an unscrupulous lawyer against the mother and daughter: to kill one and abduct the other across the Atlantic: bring her to me, she is mine.
So the lives of Cordelia and Gwenlliam Preston become unexpectedly and hauntingly entwined with the gangs of New York and the New York Municipal Police Department....
REVIEWS
“A mother and daughter
have run away to New York and joined a circus. One is a mesmerist, the other
is a tightrope-walker. Both are using the trickery and illusion beneath the
big top to hide from a violent past, but one man is hell-bent on finding
them to settle a score. A gritty 19th-century thriller.”
DAILY
EXPRESS
BOOK OF THE WEEK:
“Ideal if you want to run away with the circus.”
THE SUN
“Her makeshift family
of flamboyant characters matches the zesty bustle of New York perfectly…This
is ultimately a book of loves and dangers, and the way loves and dangers
gnaw at each other. Ewing sheds light on both.”
NEW ZEALAND
HERALD
“It’s high drama and
it happens with pace, gusto and much colour…a romping, cheerful novel full
of likeable characters, racing breathlessly towards a conclusion…”
NEW ZEALAND LISTENER
1763. As candles flicker in the falling dusk along Pall Mall, Filipo di Vecellio, fêted portrait painter from Florence, and his beautiful wife Angelica entertain the cream of London's art world in their fashionable London home, with Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough among the guests, and William Hogarth a disapproving observer. Little is known of Filipo's past or his family - except in the shadows sits his sister, Francesca, who watches, and listens, and waits.
For beneath the opulence and success, the house in Pall Mall conceals a swarm of secrets, corruption and lies. Filipo's ambition has meant numerous, terrible sacrifices for Francesca, but Filipo is not the only painter, nor the only one capable of fraud. And as the great wild city of trade and business expands its grasping, avid tentacles, a climax erupts involving love and passion - and the quiet sister who has waited so long...
REVIEWS
“New
Zealand-born Barbara Ewing, herself an actress, has a soft spot for the
inhabitants of history's demi-monde. Her latest novel opens in 1763,
as Filipo di Vecellio, a portrait painter from Florence, and his much-coiffured
wife Angelica, play host to London's art-world, entertaining Joshua
Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough and a disapproving William Hogarth at their
fashionable Pall Mall home. Not much is known about Filipo's past - though
the household is home to several secrets. In this engaging and enlightening
novel about artistic ambition and fraud at the nascent Royal Academy, Ewing
is an accomplished storyteller who puts the pleasure of her readers first.”
THE INDEPENDENT
“
...Ewing is particularly good when painting in the background of
18th-century London with all its colour and filth, and also when portraying
the plight of women of the time, financially dependent on men, their own
dreams best forgotten.
The art world provides her with plenty of
material, the character of Grace is compelling and there is some fascinating
stuff about the ruinous effects of 18th-century beauty products, but what
really makes this book worth reading is Ewings's skill at unfolding a
story."
NZ HERALD ON SUNDAY
THE MESMERIST
(Chosen as Westminster Libraries’ “ONE BOOK FOR WESTMINSTER.”)
Mesmerism, the
genesis of today’s Hypnotism, is all the rage in England in 1840 and
out-of-work actresses, Cordelia and Rillie, decide to set up their own fake
Mesmerism business in London’s Bloomsbury, to keep themselves out of the
workhouse. But Cordelia finds she actually has the Mesmeric gift - and then
the past, and a murder, intervene...
REVIEWS
“A compelling storyteller, Ewing puts on a masterly performance in
recreating Victorian theatre land. Even when the body count starts to mount,
she keeps us believing…”
THE INDEPENDENT
“Ewing’s depictions of the theatre world, the battle between mesmerists and
physicians, her portrait of the London streets, are all first-rate....she
has produced a consistently entertaining, amusing and enlightening novel -
what more can one ask?”
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
“…written with insight, intelligence and style, a highly engaging and
entertaining read with a complex plot and a cast of believable and mostly
loveable characters."
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD (Book of the Week)
ROSETTA
At the end of
the eighteenth century young girls fall in love with handsome men, get
married, and believe - of course - that they will live happily ever after.
In the middle of the Napoleonic wars, in search of a lost child and lost
love, one young girl travels to Egypt, through Cleopatra’s old city of
Alexandria, to the little town of Rosetta at the mouth of the Nile. There
the Rosetta Stone, that will unlock the Egyptian hieroglyphs and tell the
secrets of the world, has just been discovered. And, there, other
discoveries are made also.
Click here to listen to Barbara talking on Google
video about Rosetta
REVIEWS
A brilliantly evocative and superbly researched
re-creation of a period fascinated by the Rosetta Stone and the decipherment
of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. For Barbara Ewing, history is not merely a
decorative background for romance, but the very centre of a passionate and
enthralling intellectual adventure.
DR RICHARD PARKINSON, Assistant Keeper, department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, the British Museum
" A delightful plum pudding of a historical novel"
SUNDAY TIMES
“….engrossing saga set in 1795, following Rose and Fanny from their innocent
childhoods and premature marriages.....both women undertake heroic
journeys,...one flees to India while the other embarks on an even more
gruelling adventure to Egypt. The feminist agenda of rebellion and
enlightenment mirrors one of the major preoccupations of the Romantic age
and
there are some fascinating historical details....absorbing.
TIME OUT
“....a convincing and stirring period epic.”
NEW ZEALAND HERALD
THE TRESPASS
A cholera
plague in Victorian London heightens the dark secrets in the house of a
well-to-do English family. Every month small, brave sailing ships leave for
the outer regions of the new British Empire and on one of those small ships
a desperate young girl hides, knowing very little about this new country,
New Zealand and what she might find there. And not knowing that she
will be followed to the other side of the world by people who - each for
their own reasons - cannot live without her.
REVIEWS
“A detailed and extremely readable novel. Full of well-realised, interesting
and believable characters.”
GOOD BOOK GUIDE
“Compelling story-telling and an exquisitely detailed evocation of Victorian
London. Barbara Ewing’s cholera-ridden London is so vivid you can smell it.
CLARE BOYLAN
Ewing writes accessibly and tells a ripping good story, but her passion is
also for ideas...Ewing keeps the pace up right to the dramatic ending.
NEW ZEALAND HERALD
(long-listed for the Orange Prize)
In the 1950s, when people who had never left New Zealand still called England ‘home’, New Zealand prided itself on being The Greatest Little Country in the World, where there were no racial problems and everybody lived happily together in God’s Own Country. Was it that way? A novel of love and pain and laughter and music. And loss.
REVIEWS
“…a vivid sense of the era, with its swirly skirts, box brownies and the
last tram home.”
SUNDAY TIMES
“…rich, vivid and interesting and woven into a plot that has a ring of
verisimilitude and plenty of fascinating detail.”
THE TIMES
“Ewing’s absence from New Zealand over a long acting career has perhaps
given her a clearer view of New Zealand society than we who live here can
have.
In showing us how much we believe we have changed, she reveals to us how
much we have yet to understand. WAIKATO TIMES
THE
ACTRESSES
A class reunion
at a London drama school in the 1990s triggers a series of dramatic events
that leads to a celebrity court case in the Old Bailey, and shows the
successes and the failures - and the past and the memories - of a group of
famous (and not-so-famous) actors and actresses.
REVIEWS
“This is an excellent account of the late middle-aged antics of the class of
’59...a terrific insight into actors’ childish psyches. Ewing understands
the different kinds of love and friendship, and the denouement on a Hawaiian
island is pure Jilly Cooper.” SUNDAY TIMES
“..excellent..Ewing, herself an actress, weaves a plot as complex as
fair-isle knitting, darting teasingly between past and present, and fastens
off all the threads so that the pattern is satisfyingly complete.”
DAILY TELEGRAPH
“Ms Ewing is herself an actress of distinction, and knows how to create
believable yet memorable characters, to evoke place and to tell a story
which takes hold of the reader and holds them enthralled - through tears and
laughter - from the first page to the last.”
GAY TIMES