A Net for Small Fishes
A Novel
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4.4 • 19 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"A bravura historical debut . . . a gloriously immersive escape." —Guardian
Wolf Hall meets The Favourite in Lucy Jago's A Net For Small Fishes, a gripping dark novel based on the true scandal of two women determined to create their own fates in the Jacobean court.
With Frankie, I could have the life I had always wanted . . . and with me she could forge something more satisfying from her own . . .
When Frances Howard, beautiful but unhappy wife of the Earl of Essex, meets the talented Anne Turner, the two strike up an unlikely, yet powerful, friendship. Frances makes Anne her confidante, sweeping her into a glamorous and extravagant world, riven with bitter rivalry.
As the women grow closer, each hopes to change her circumstances. Frances is trapped in a miserable marriage while loving another, and newly-widowed Anne struggles to keep herself and her six children alive as she waits for a promised proposal. A desperate plan to change their fortunes is hatched. But navigating the Jacobean court is a dangerous game and one misstep could cost them everything.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The brilliant adult fiction debut from historian and YA author Jago (The Northern Lights) fictionalizes a 17th-century London murder. Anne Turner, a skilled herbalist with a gift for fashion, leads a comfortable middle-class life with her physician husband and six children. Frances "Frankie" Devereux, a member of the powerful Howard family, is married to the physically abusive Earl of Essex. When the two women meet in 1609, they feel a "profound sense of recognition" despite their differences in age, situation, and class. The following year, Anne's husband's death leaves her and the children impoverished, while Frankie becomes infatuated with Robert Carr, King James's favorite courtier. As Carr falls in love with Frankie, his doting friend Thomas Overbury, a bitter misogynist who loathes the Howards, grows jealous. Frankie's family decides to arrange the annulment of her marriage to Essex, but salacious rumors spread by Overbury sabotage her reputation and their plan. Swayed by Frankie's misery and reliant on her financial assistance, Anne accedes to her friend's conviction that Overbury must die. "If I were a man, I could end this with a duel," Frankie says as the two decide to poison him. Jago's striking depictions of bearbaiting and court mourning, wedding breakfasts and adulterous trysts capture both the brutality and the refinement of Jacobean London. Anne's shrewd narration grounds the novel's explosive drama even as she slides toward mortal danger one apparently logical choice at a time. It adds up to a remarkable exploration of the power, limits, and price of women's friendship. This is a sparkling achievement.
