London, 1666. Elizabeth ‘Bird’ Carpenter has a wonderful singing voice, and music is her chief passion. When her father persuades her to marry horse-dealer Christopher Knepp, she suspects she is marrying beneath her station, but nothing prepares her for the reality of life with Knepp. Her father has betrayed her trust, for Knepp cares only for […]
In search of the animals in the Great Fire of London
Deborah Swift came across an intriguing area of research when working on her latest novel based on the lives of the women who appear in Samuel Pepys’s Diary, Entertaining Mr Pepys, set in 1666. Among the records we have on the Great Fire of London, there’s one topic which was something of a beast to […]