Falling Angels

The novel opens in January 1901, when Queen Victoria dies and England is left unsure of what comes next. Tracy Chevalier uses that moment of national mourning as the backdrop for the story of two London families, the Colemans and the Waterhouses. They are neighbors whose family plots in Highgate Cemetery lie side by side, and the cemetery becomes a meeting place for both households. The story is told by a shifting set of narrators: husbands and wives, friends and lovers, employers and the servants who work for them, and a gravedigger's son who sees the cemetery from the inside. Each voice shows a different side of a society where old Victorian habits of grief, propriety and class are loosening. Daughters and mothers begin to question the roles assigned to them, and the lines between the two households blur and tighten as a result. Chevalier, the author of Girl with a Pearl Earring, again builds a vivid, closely observed past from its small domestic details. Falling Angels is a quiet, character-driven portrait of a country at the edge of the modern age, told through people who are caught between what they have inherited and what they want.