Falling angels - Tracy Chevalier (First edition)

Falling Angels is a novel from Tracy Chevalier, bestselling author of Girl With a Pearl Earring. A poignant tale of two families brought reluctantly together, it is an intimate story of childhood friendships, sexual awakening and human frailty. Yet it takes in the changing of a nation, the fight for women’s suffrage and the questioning of steadfast beliefs.

January 1901, the day after Queen Victoria’s death: two families visit neighbouring graves in a fashionable London cemetery. One is decorated with a sentimental angel, the other an elaborate urn. The Waterhouses revere the late Queen and cling to Victorian traditions; the Colemans look forward to a more modern society. To their mutual distaste, the families are inextricably linked when their daughters become friends behind the tombstones. And worse, befriend the gravedigger’s muddy son.

As the girls grow up and the new century finds its feet, as cars replace horses and electricity outshines gas lighting, the nation emerges from the shadows of oppressive Victorian values to a golden Edwardian summer. It is then that the beautiful, frustrated Mrs Coleman makes a bid for greater personal freedom, with disastrous consequences, and the lives of the Colemans and the Waterhouses are changed forever.