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Shrines of Gaiety: The Sunday Times Bestseller, May 2023

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The novel grabs the reader from the outset. It paints a picture of the capital’s glittering nightlife and its seedier underside so vivid, that it is almost possible to smell the stale cigarette smoke and taste the alcohol…The story of Nellie and her family, and the characters they associate with, builds to a satisfying ending as the strands of their lives are deftly woven together.”

Shrines of Gaiety: A Novel: Atkinson, Kate: 9780593466322 Shrines of Gaiety: A Novel: Atkinson, Kate: 9780593466322

There’s a certain joy in opening a Kate Atkinson novel—a feeling that every element matters and that each surprise will ultimately make perfect sense…Atkinson’s characters and their choices, curiosities and corruptions keep the story unfolding, making the resolution worth every second.” Sharp, witty and fiendishly plotted ... you don't so much as read it as surrender to it FINANCIAL TIMES, 'Best books of 2022' I warn you: this one takes a while to get going. Which is not such a surprise once you realize there are approximately 15 main characters. There's at least 5 plots, probably more like 8 or 10, which sounds unmanageable but it's surprisingly breezy. Reading it felt a lot like an extremely well plotted prestige tv series, where you spend the first two episodes planting a lot of seeds and learning who everyone is, then you get to just watch it go from there. He had no liquor licence, but did have tame police, and Nellie learned the trade well. When a young Irish girl, Maud, died of an opium overdose, Nellie dealt with it by suggesting a couple of army chaps take her body to the river to dispose of her. Atkinson is a thoughtful writer with an astute understanding of 20th-century social history. This is the perfect novel for uncertain times, when comfort of a particularly English and nostalgic stripe is required.’ – The Times

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Set during Jazz Age London, in all its fizzy madness and desperation…. As dark as [Atkinson’s] stories can get, within them always shines a beacon of humanity.” —Gillian Flynn, bestselling author of Dark Places In this fizzy, sprawling picaresque — filigreedwith outsize characters and the improbable coincidencesof a Victorian serial — the novelist imaginesa former combat nurse looking for a missinggirl in a London that’s shaking off World War I.” Maddox (promoted to inspector after the war), was in collision with Nellie Coker, He protected her from the law, but wasn’t sure what else he benefited from.

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson - Publishers Weekly Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson - Publishers Weekly

The notorious queen of this glittering world is Nellie Coker, ruthless but also ambitious to advance her six children, including the enigmatic eldest, Niven whose character has been forged in the crucible of the Somme. But success breeds enemies, and Nellie’s empire faces threats from without and within. For beneath the dazzle of Soho’s gaiety, there is a dark underbelly, a world in which it is all too easy to become lost. Years ago, her husband had gambled all the family money away, so Nellie had taken her four children and joined forces with a disreputable man called Jaeger, who had been running ‘tango teas’ during the war, but by 1918, people were ready to really party. Not at all,’ the toff said, swaying affably. ‘It’s a cause for festivities. Old Ma Coker is being released.’ Whilst not containing a maternal bone in her body, Nellie will do whatever she can to ensure the survival and elevation of her 6 children. There is the war hardened sniper and his own man, Niven, the reliable book keeper Edith, the Cambridge educated if vacuous, Betty and Shirley, expected to marry into the aristocracy, the unrooted Ramsay with his pretensions of being a novelist, and the young Kitty. Upon being released from a stint in Holloway Prison, Nellie is the toast of the town, but some sense weakness, making plans to grab her business empire, willing to do anything to hasten her downfall, others pose a danger to her family, and some threats come from within. But Nellie is no pushover, she might be getting older, but she has not lost her guile and cunning. The honest DCI John Frobisher wants to ensure Ma Coker faces justice, and recruits an unlikely spy, a provincial librarian and ex-battlefield nurse, Gwendolen Kelling, with her charismatic spirit of adventure, to help him. She is in London to finally live a life, and to find the runaway girls, Freda, chasing her pipe dreams of dancing and fame, and her naive and more innocent friend, Florence.One or two larks do feel oddly barbed: when Nellie’s foolish son, Ramsay, a would-be novelist, deludedly pictures book-buyers lining up for his first novel, still mid-draft, we’re told he sees it as “a crime novel, but… also ‘a razor-sharp dissection of the various strata of society in the wake of the destruction of war’. (Ramsay was not without ambition.)” A bit of fun, to be sure, but the joke feels like Atkinson punching down, since she herself pulls off exactly this feat – unless her point is that it’s silly to see Shrines of Gaiety that way, in which case she’s chiding the appreciative reader.

Shrines of Gaiety: From the global No.1 bestselling author of Shrines of Gaiety: From the global No.1 bestselling author of

THE AUTHOR: Kate Atkinson was born in York and now lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and she has been a critically acclaimed international bestselling author ever since. This is a well-crafted combination of history and fiction, which begins in London in 1926 with the release from prison of Nellie Coker. Nellie is the well-known owner of infamous night clubs and the single mother of six adult children. There are many characters and intersecting story lines, which flow seamlessly. This book is one to savour, for the energy, for the wit, for the tenderness of characterisation that make Atkinson enduringly popular.’ – The Guardian True, the panoptic style trades mystery for buoyancy, yet who needs suspense when Atkinson can fell a key character with nothing but a careless step into a busy road? A stirring climax redeems the novel’s more nightmarish developments by giving centre stage to a vengeful act of solidarity by the real-life, all-female gang the Forty Thieves. Wish fulfilment, maybe, yet so deeply has Atkinson drunk from the history of the period (as an afterword attests) that you’re ready to give her the benefit of the doubt; either way, you’re left grateful for the gear change, even as the longed-for justice of girl power only serves to pave the way for the rougher justice of state power at its most lethal. The wonder – as the noose tightens – is the suppleness that enables Atkinson to segue from scenes of pitch-dark horror to a brisk “what everyone did next” coda without sugar-coating the tale’s bitter kernel: it’s a peak performance of consummate control.

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