Published in 2013 (first published 2011)
342 pages
Katie Ward was born in Somerset in 1979. She has worked in the public and voluntary sectors, including at a women’s refuge and for a Member of Parliament. She took a career break in order to write her debut novel, Girl Reading, after coming across an article about a book of portraits of women and girls reading.
What is this book about?
Seven portraits. Seven artists. Seven girls and women reading. A young orphan poses nervously for a Renaissance maestro in medieval Siena, and an artist’s servant girl in 17th-century Amsterdam snatches a moment away from her work to lose herself in tales of knights and battles. A young woman reading in a Shoreditch bar catches the eye of a young man who takes her picture, and a Victorian medium holds a book that she barely acknowledges while she waits for the exposure. Each chapter of this richly textured debut takes us into a perfectly imagined tale of how each portrait came to be, and as the connections accumulate, the narrative leads us into the present and beyond – an inspired celebration of women reading and the artists who have caught them in the act.
