Jane Borodale

Jane Borodale combines fiction and visual art with close attention to craft, landscape, and material detail. Her debut novel, The Book of Fires, begins in Sussex in 1752, when seventeen-year-old Agnes Trussel leaves home while pregnant and travels to London. There she becomes assistant to John Blacklock, a withdrawn maker of fireworks, and learns the dangerous precision of his trade. Penguin Random House describes the novel as historical fiction shaped by Agnes’s secret and by the charged atmosphere of eighteenth-century London. Borodale’s own site identifies the book as her first novel and records its international publication. Fireworks give the story both its working vocabulary and its central metaphor: controlled mixtures can produce beauty, but a small error can have grave consequences. Borodale keeps Agnes’s practical intelligence at the centre as she navigates employment, concealment, and an unfamiliar city. The Book of Fires combines a coming-of-age narrative with unusually tactile accounts of making, risk, and apprenticeship.