Birdcage Walk - Hardcover

"Much like a slick, shape-shifting spook, Exposure is many things at once--an espionage thriller, a forbidden-love story, an immigrant's tale--and it assumes these varied identities with confidence . . . a novel you won't be able to shake."--Entertainment Weekly

"Dunmore has always been fantastic on the complexity of people's motivations and the secret reasons they act as they do. This book is no exception . . . This may be an unconventional thriller, but it's still a page turner for that . . . as much a surprising love story as it is a tale of spies." --New York Times Book Review

"Dunmore's strategy, placing a triangle of past and present loves within a spy novel, yields an unexpected dividend...viscerally exciting."--New Yorker

"There are resemblances to Virginia Woolf not only in the terrific prose...a luminous story of courage and forgiveness."--Arts Fuse

"A spy novel but one that has been quietly and ingeniously deepened well beyond the ambitions of genre . . . one of those books that you read with your heart in your mouth, your mind fully engaged, and with a sense of desolation as you note the dwindling number of pages left before it comes to an end." --Chicago Tribune

It is 1792 and Europe is seized by political turmoil and violence. Lizzie Fawkes has grown up in Radical circles where each step of the French Revolution is followed with eager idealism. But she has recently married John Diner Tredevant, a property developer who is heavily invested in Bristol’s housing boom, and he has everything to lose from social upheaval and the prospect of war. Soon his plans for a magnificent terrace built above the two-hundred-foot drop of the Gorge come under threat. Tormented and striving Diner believes that Lizzie’s independent, questioning spirit must be coerced and subdued. She belongs to him: law and custom confirm it, and she must live as he wants—his passion for Lizzie darkening until she finds herself dangerously alone.

Weaving a deeply personal and moving story with a historical moment of critical and complex importance, Birdcage Walk is an unsettling and brilliantly tense drama of public and private violence, resistance and terror from one of our greatest storytellers.