Lily: A Tale of Revenge from the Sunday Times bestselling author

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The book is descriptively written and the characters felt true to the era and the storyline is captivating on so many levels. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site.

From Sunday Times bestselling novelist Rose Tremain comes a gripping novel of murder and revenge set in Victorian England. He takes her to the Foundling Hospital at Coram Fields where, much later, she is horribly abused by a vindictive nurse. We’re in favourite author territory here; Rose Tremain’s novels and short stories have been a reliable pleasure for many years, and her latest, Lily, is no exception. Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual.The rawness of the poverty and suffering people suffered in the Victorian era doesn't bare thinking about.

Of course, her suffering and her guilt would be with her forever, but this would feel more in keeping with the character that Tremain has built up. The darkness, though, remains - but it's in her soul, where she guards a fierce need for revenge, and later, a dark and terrible secret. She manages to survive and sets out to forge some sort of life for herself, though never forgives her earlier ill treatment. however, at first I thought, with the most intense disappointment, that this was just going to be yet another facile, implausible Victorian melodrama.

While it did keep my interest (and I read it in one sitting), this is only because I’m interested in the period and the subject. It is nearly three-quarters of the way through the book that we reach the grisly murder scene, though the readers must have guessed, long before that, whom she had killed. It moved in strange patterns, like a wispy black scarf threatening to touch their faces, then suddenly disappearing to reveal the way ahead. We know from the cover of the book that her story is ‘a tale of revenge’ but we don’t know until quite late in the book the reason for this act of revenge, or the identity of her victim, or how Lily carried out this murder.

In London, in the winter of 1850, baby Lily Mortimer is found abandoned at the gates of a park by a young police constable, who takes her to the London Foundling Hospital.The only thing I was absolutely certain about from the start was that Lily would be a really robust little spirit, although I wasn’t certain initially how her courage would show itself, or how her relationship with Sam was going to go. Restoration also inspired an Oscar-winning 1995 film adaptation, starring Robert Downey Jr and Ian McKellen.