Set in 1790's Covent Garden this book whisks you back to a bygone era. The narrator's colourful slang and confident I-will-tell-you-how-it-really-is, makes the story sparkle off the page. It is the tale of Cat Royal, an orphan who lives at the back of the real-life theatre in Drury Lane. It contains a wonderful colourful cast of characters - awkward actors, on stage, and off, barrow boys in the grimy marketplace, street gangs fighting for territory...and it's packed with local colour and authentic detail. And of course there is the diamond mystery. What more could you want?
Julia Golding read English at Cambridge then joined the Foreign Office and served in Poland. Her work as a diplomat took her from the high point of town twinning in the Tatra Mountains to the low of inspecting the bottom of a Silesian coal mine. On leaving Poland, she exchanged diplomacy for academia and took a doctorate in the literature of the English Roma
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