Synopses & Reviews
A fashionable London cemetery, January 1901: Two graves stand side by side, one decorated with an oversize classical urn, the other with a sentimental marble angel. Two families, visiting their respective graves on the day after Queen Victoria's death, teeter on the brink of a new era. The Colemans and the Waterhouses are divided by social class as well as taste. They would certainly not have become acquainted had not their two girls, meeting behind the tombstones, become best friends. And, even more unsuitably, become involved with the gravedigger's muddy son.
As the girls grow up, as the new king changes social customs, as a new, forward-thinking era takes wing, the lives and fortunes of the two families become more and more closely intertwined neighbors in life as well as death.
Against a gas-lit backdrop of social and political history, Tracy Chevalier explores the prejudices and flaws of a changing time. A novel that is at once elegant, daring, original, and compelling, Falling Angels is a splendid follow-up to the book The New York Times called "marvelously evocative" and The Wall Street Journal deemed "triumphant."
Review
"Chevalier's second novel captures not only the progressive spirit of post-Victorian England but also its conventions, such as the preoccupation with death and the impossibly mature voices of young children. Accomplished and powerful, it is certain to appeal to those who made Chevalier's first novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, a surprise best-seller and a favorite on the book-club circuit." Booklist
Review
"[A] thoughtful exploration of the ways people misread each other by being trapped in their own perspectives." People
Review
"Told from alternating points of view, this moving, bittersweet book flaunts Chevalier's gift for creating complex characters and an engaging plot." Ann Collette, Book magazine