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Mary Barton
Mary Barton
Jul 30, 2025 9:47 PM

Author:Elizabeth Gaskell,MacDonald Daly,MacDonald Daly

Mary Barton

Mary Barton is beautiful but has been born poor. Her father fights for the rights of his fellow workers, but Mary wants to make a better life for them both. She rashly decides to reject her lover Jem, a struggling engineer, in the hope of marrying the rich mill-owner's son Henry Carson and securing a safe future. But when Henry is shot down in the street and Jem becomes the main suspect, Mary finds herself hopelessly torn between them. She also discovers an unpleasant truth - one that could bring tragedy upon everyone, and threatens to destroy her.

Reviews

A sensitive, honest and horrifying portrait of everyday life in an elite, expensive boarding school

—— Josh Lacey , Guardian

The intensity of the passions depicted in the novel is not so much matched by the writing itself as generated by it... In it we experience, like a new discovery, the appalling kinship between uncontrollable love and equally uncontrollable lovelessness

—— Paul Binding , Times Literary Supplement

Experimental and certainly ambitious

—— Doug Johnstone , Big Issue

A well-paced narrative with carefully crafted twists...intensely visual descriptions... Inventive in its form and often profound in its poetry, Symmons Roberts' gripping story is a meditation on the difficulty of forgiveness in wartime

—— Sunday Telegraph

Symmons Roberts is already a poet of note, and this...is discernibly a poet's book. Short and introspective, it stays in the mind and echoes

—— The Times

Magically spun out. An entrancing yet disturbing book

—— Sunday Express

An absorbing fable of the here-and-now

—— Independent

Dazzling

—— Vanity Fair

A brilliant evocation of the life of the inventor Nikola Tesla

—— Guardian

Remarkable... Hunt wears her historical and scientific learning lightly

—— Financial Times

Hunt's deft blend of sf elements and romantic subplots may remind readers of Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, while her prose style and attention to historical detail are on a par with Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Hunt's greatest triumph, however, lies in her depiction of Tesla, who wavers between genius and madness with carefully controlled charm.

—— Library Journal

A fantastical story that engages the heart and mind, as Hunt pays tribute to the power of invention, and the enduring strength of love

—— Psychologies

Hunt has done a fine job of reanimating the dead and reawakening my curiosity about this odd, overlooked man... Hunt's prose is sylish and tasty and her observations wise and witty

—— Scotsman

Weird and wonderful debut novel

—— Red

Remarkable...Hunt wears her historical and scientific learning lightly

—— Financial Times

An ambitious conflation of fact and fiction

—— Literary Review

Samantha Hunt's fantasy comes closer than any biography to solving the riddle of Tesla's commercial and personal failings ... The Invention of Everything Else is perfect for nights spent in the wrong hotel, once your travel plans have, as usual, gone subtly awry

—— New Scientist

a fascinating blend of fact, fiction, history and dare I say, science fiction surrounding the weird and wonderful life of Nikola Tesla the acknowledged father of radio and AC electricity.

—— Dovegreyreader

her portrait of Tesla buzzes with vitality

—— Metro

This unusual novel skilfully interweaves the story of the eccentric inventor of radio and AC electricity with that of Louisa ... a compelling novel.

—— Emma Lee-Potter , Express

A sophisticated pastiche of science fiction, fantasy, melodrama, and historical anecdote....It all adds up to a precocious math of human marvel

—— Elle

Witty and effortlessly fluid. His books are laugh-out-loud funny

—— Arabella Weir

P.G. Wodehouse wrote the best English comic novels of the century

—— Sebastian Faulks

Sublime comic genius

—— Ben Elton

Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in

—— Evelyn Waugh
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