The Fire and the Rose by Robyn Cadwallader
About Robyn Cadwallader
Robyn Cadwallader lives among vineyards in beautiful Ngunnawal country. Her first novel, The Anchoress (2015), was published internationally to critical acclaim. It won a Canberra Critics’ Circle Award and was nominated for the Indie Book Awards, Adelaide Festival Awards, ABIA Awards and ACT Book of the Year Award. Her second novel, Book of Colours (2018), won the ACT Book of the Year Award, a Canberra Critics’ Circle Award and was shortlisted for the Voss Award. A non-fiction book based on her PhD thesis about virginity and female agency in the Middle Ages was published in 2008. For further information, visit:
A Quote from Robyn Cadwallader
“I am delighted and grateful to be included in the long list for the ARA Historical Novel Prize; I think of the nomination as a prize in itself. The ARA Historical Novel Prize is an important affirmation of the significance of historical fiction in Australian literary culture. Historical fiction helps to bring history into contemporary imagination and the continued conversation between past and present offers an eye toward a more hopeful future.”
About The Fire and the Rose
England, 1276: Forced to leave her home village, Eleanor moves to Lincoln to work as a housemaid. She’s prickly, independent and stubborn, her prospects blighted by a port-wine birthmark across her face. Unusually for a woman, she has fine skills with ink and quill, and harbours a secret ambition to work as a scribe, a profession closed to women.
Eleanor discovers that Lincoln is a dangerous place, divided by religious prejudice, the Jews frequently the focus of violence and forced to wear a yellow badge. Eleanor falls in love with Asher, a Jewish spicer, but their relationship is forbidden by law. When Eleanor is pulled into the dark depths of the church’s machinations against Jews and the king issues an edict expelling all Jews from England, Eleanor and Asher are faced with an impossible choice.
Vivid, rich, deep and sensual, The Fire and the Rose is a tender and moving novel about how language, words and books have the power to change and shape lives. Most powerfully, it is also a novel about what it is to be made ‘other’, to be exiled from home and family.
