Yarrawonga Chronicle

The City of Tears

By Daneka Hill

This book opens with the line: The woman is lying beneath a white sheet in a white room, dreaming of colour.

A very hefty book with 541 pages — definitely one for the super readers among us.

The City of Tears is historical fiction through and through — the pages are jam-packed with political, architectural and religious details.

A great read if you’re interested in European history and culture, particularly French, Dutch and even Afrikaans (South African Dutch settlers).

This book is set around the Wars of Religion, a critical and infamous time for Western Europe. The mass killings led to the creation of the word réfugié to describe Protestants who fled France after their rights to religious liberty were revoked. This is where the word refugee comes from.

This book is part two in The

Burning Chambers series but you don’t need to read the first book, so keep that in mind.

The plot is driven by female characters who keep themselves busy with avoiding assassins, stabbing people and living in PTSD-worthy levels of terror.

This sort of ‘European women in wartime’ stuff is shifting massive amounts of books and readers are eating it up, so don’t knock it til you’ve tried it.

The City of Tears by Kate Mosse is published by Pan MacMillan, RRP $32.99.

Opinion

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2021-09-14T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-14T07:00:00.0000000Z

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