Author: wpadmin_dev_lydiasyson_u01
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Citoyennes: women of the Paris Commune
First posted May 5th, 2015 (links updated/revised 26.2.26) The mythical figure of the pétroleuse, hideous or heroic depending on your point of view, has now almost been forgotten. For decades it was the most abiding image of the 1871 Paris Commune, and undoubtedly helped to hide the true history of real women’s involvement in France’s…
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Mr Peacock’s Possession: sources & background reading
As noted in the book, the most important sources for Mr Peacock’s Possessions were: Elsie K Morton Crusoes of Sunday Island, 1957. Steven Gentry, Raoul & the Kermadecs: New Zealand’s Northernmost Islands, Steele Roberts, 2013. Margaret Pointer, Niue 1774-1974: 200 years of contact and change, Otago University Press, 2015. SOAS London Missionary Society Archives What follows now is not exactly a bibliography, and…
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Liberty’s Fire: sources and background reading
“What is the Commune, that sphinx so tantalising to the bourgeois mind?” Simply put, the Paris Commune was the radical municipal government elected to run the French capital in March 1871 immediately after the Franco-Prussian War and the Siege of Paris. This revolution shouldn’t be confused with the first French Revolution in 1789, or the…
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A World Between Us
Spain, 1936. Felix, a spirited young nurse, runs away from London to help the cause of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. But she is also following Nat, a passionate young man from the Jewish East End who has joined the International Brigades to fight Franco. And George – familiar George from home –…
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That Burning Summer
A Book of the Year (2013) for The Independent and Lovereading Romney Marsh, July 1940. When invasion threatens, you have to grow up quickly. Sixteen-year-old Peggy has been putting on a brave face since the fall of France, not least for the sake of her anxiety-prone younger brother Ernest. But now the enemy is overhead, and the rules are…
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Liberty’s Fire
A Telegraph Best YA Book of 2015 Paris, 1871. Nearly 40 years after the events of Les Miserables, a new revolution is brewing . . . Though the Franco-Prussian war is over, life through the siege has been tough, and peace proves bitter. On the edge of despair, Zéphyrine finds inspiration in the hope offered by the…
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Doctor of Love
Widely accepted as the world’s first sex therapist, Dr Graham set out to bring the sublime into the sex life of every married couple. He guaranteed both ecstasy and fertility to the users of his infamous Celestial Bed, a contraption which harnessed all the most exciting developments of the Enlightenment. Electricity, magnetism, mind-altering gasses and…
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Mr Peacock’s Possessions
“I wake again and again and wish we had never come to this place. It seems to me that we have broken into the middle of a story and now we are part of it.” Oceania, 1879. Lizzie Peacock and her siblings have endured a hardscrabble life since their parents brought them to settle a…
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That Burning Summer: sources & background reading
Interested in exploring any of the history, ideas or places in That Burning Summer? Here are some good starting points – books, short stories, websites, online articles, films, museums etc, all loosely grouped by theme, many of which obviously overlap. Clearly, this is far from definitive. Most of this I used while I was writing the novel, but I…
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A World Between Us: sources & background reading
There have been well over 15,000 books written in English about the Spanish Civil War – twice that many in Spanish, and more are published every month in Spain. Here I’ve listed some of the books that influenced me most when I was writing A World Between Us, as well as a few more recent publications, many…