Beautiful Lies - Hardcover

“A stirring and seductive novel.”—Economist

London 1887. For Maribel Campbell Lowe, the beautiful bohemian wife of a maverick politician, it is the year to make something of herself. A self-proclaimed Chilean heiress educated in Paris, she is torn between poetry and the new art of photography. But it is soon plain that Maribel’s choices are not so simple. As her husband’s career hangs by a thread, her real past, and the family she abandoned, come back to haunt them both. When the notorious newspaper editor Alfred Webster begins to take an uncommon interest in Maribel, she fears he will not only destroy Edward’s career but both of their reputations.

Inspired by the true story of a politician’s wife who lived a double life for decades, Beautiful Lies is set in a time that, fraught with economic uncertainty and tabloid scandal-mongering, uncannily presages our own.

The story of the exotic wife of an aristocrat who is not what she seems, set against the backdrop of the drawing rooms and emerging tabloid culture of Victorian London

Praise for Clare Clark

“One of those writers who can see into the past and help us feel its texture.” –Hilary Mantel

“As a storyteller, Clark is endowed with verve and intelligence, but her larger gift, dazzlingly in evidence throughout both her fine novels, lies in the originality of her imagination. She gives us a world that feels alive and intense, magnificently raw.”—New York Times Book Review

“Powerful . . . Clark’s commitment to historical color is matched by the dramatic arc of an engrossing story.”—Washington Post

“Clare Clark writes with the eyes of a historian and the soul of a novelist.”—Amanda Foreman