Life Mask

Description

A love story. A gamble. A battle. Let the games begin. It's an era of looming war, and the erosion of freedom in the name of national security. A time of high art and big business, trashy spectacles and financial disasters. Celebrities are hounded by journalists, who serve up private passions alongside public crises. Marriages stretch or break, and so do friendships; political liaisons prove as dangerous as erotic ones. In Parliament, on stage, in the bedroom, at the race track, round the dinner table, old loyalties are wrenched by the winds of change. The World - as elite calls itself - is fighting to survive these chaotic times.

Emma Donoghue is an Irish novelist, playwright and historian. She lives in Canada.

'A born writer' New York Times Book Review '... another bright, bruising slice of eighteenth-century life in London ... Why should Michel Faber hog the glory?' Elle 'Donoghue's latest book pulsates with the vibrancy of London in an era that couldn't be more extravagant. While Mad King George was teetering on the throne, the grotesquely privileged carried on a gaudy social whirl' Time Out