A Place of Greater Safety

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Also, at times she employs an omniscient narrator to tell the leading events of the Revolution, and these parts can sound like a history book, although they are never dry or boring.

Lucile Desmoulins, who approaches various people in Paris in an attempt to rescue her husband, is guillotined shortly afterwards. I wrote a letter to an agent saying would you look at my book, it’s about the French Revolution, it’s not a historical romance, and the letter came back saying, we do not take historical romances [. Of the three protagonists, Robespierre is the only one who wins his election to the Estates General. My first book was pure wish fulfilment, about a girl who became a dancer, and with the recent publication of a ballet trilogy – Born to Dance, Star Quality and Showtime – I seem to have come full circle.A Place of Greater Safety is a stunning epic novel of the French Revolution, written by the late Hilary Mantel long before her most famous work, Wolf Hall.

A farm laborer carried the heavy body in his arms; she could see how his knees bent under the deadweight. In fact, the first half of the book can be hard to get a hold of: we're introduced to Camille Desmoulins, Maximilien Robespierre and George-Jacques Danton along with a proverbial cast of thousands but they rarely talk politics until suddenly the Bastille is being attacked.

He understood very well that it was his mother, the hatchet-nosed corpse with its terrifying paper hands. An online friend of mine, in the early days of the internet, was a real expert in the French Revolution, and she recommended A Place of Greater Safety as the greatest novel ever written about the Revolution. It is a brilliantly interwoven tale of the main protagonists of the French Revolution and is told with. In one paragraph you have a narrator telling you what is happening and then in the next the story is told from the perspective of Camille, Max, Georges or someone else and you don’t always know whose eyes you are seeing the story through until a few sentences in. he is corrupt and even envelops the Crown Jewels in a plot to further both the revolution and his own coffers.