The Photographer's Wife
Ebook
Overview
Jerusalem, 1920: in an already fractured city, eleven-year-old Prudence feels the tension rising as her architect father launches an ambitious – and wildly eccentric – plan to redesign the Holy City by importing English parks to the desert. Prue, known as the 'little witness', eavesdrops underneath the tables of tearooms and behind the curtains of the dance-halls of the city's elite, watching everything but rarely being watched herself. Around her, British colonials, exiled Armenians and German officials rub shoulders as they line up the pieces in a political game: a game destined to lead to disaster.
When Prue's father employs a British pilot, William Harrington, to take aerial photographs of the city, Prue is uncomfortably aware of the attraction that sparks between him and Eleanora, the English wife of a famous Jerusalem photographer. And, after Harrington learns that Eleanora's husband is a nationalist, intent on removing the British, those sparks are fanned dangerously into a flame.
Years later, in 1937, Prue is an artist living a reclusive life by the sea with her young son, when Harrington pays her a surprise visit. What he reveals unravels her world, and she must follow the threads that lead her back to secrets long-ago buried in Jerusalem. The Photographer's Wife is a powerful story of betrayal: between father and daughter, between husband and wife, and between nations and people, set in the complex period between the two world wars.
By the author of A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar, an LA Times bestseller: a beautiful and gripping story of love and betrayal, set in 1920s Jerusalem and 1930s Sussex
For anyone who loved Atonement by Ian McEwan, The Paris Wife by Paula McLain and The Aftermath by Rhidian Brook
A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar was was an LA Times Bestseller, a Guardian/
Observer Book of the Year 2012 and translated into 16 languages. It was long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin literary award 2014
A powerful story of betrayal: between father and daughter; between husband and wife; and by officials during the complex period between the two World Wars -- with profound resonance for world-stage events today
Suzy's short story, 'Theory of Flight' was broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She is a travel writer for Vogue and Lonely Planet and was writer-in-residence at the Shoreham Airport in Sussex (where much of the novel is set) and in Ramallah
A haunting, original and beautifully written tale
Bold and elegant ... An ambitious, accomplished debut
Sprightly, engaging and lovingly written
A delicate yet gutsy spirit of adventure pervades its pages ... Joinson writes with a control and vivacity that fires our own dreams of flight
Captivating … Vivid descriptions of exotic landscapes combined with those of Prudence's solitary life in a cabin by the sea give the story an ethereal quality … An engaging read filled with tension and surprises on every page
- Title: The Photographer's Wife
- Author: Suzanne Joinson
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
- Print Publication Date: 2016
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 352
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781408840795, 9781408840801, 1408840804, 1408840790
- Resource ID: LLS:9781408840795
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T11:47:07Z
Suzanne Joinson is an award-winning writer of fiction and non-fiction whose work has appeared in, among other places, the New York Times, Vogue, Aeon, Lonely Planet travel writing anthologies and the Independent on Sunday. Her first novel, A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar (2012), was translated into sixteen languages and was a national bestseller. She lives in Sussex.
suzannejoinson.com / @suzyjoinson