Reading Room : Camilla’s January Selections

Today, Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cornwall unveiled her first selections for her hew Reading Room.

The Duchess is a strong advocate of literacy and takes every chance she can to encourage reading among people of any age.

The Duchess shared reading lists early in the COVID lockdowns and created her Reading Room after an overwhelmingly positive response from the public.

Below you will find her first four selections:

The Mirror & The Light	Where the Crawdads Sing
Restless	The Architect’s Apprentice

A bit about the Books

The Mirror & The Light.  The long-awaited conclusion to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy about the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell. The Mirror & the Light carries the reader spellbound. A rollercoaster of Cromwell’s political scheming and robust imagination.

Where the Crawdads Sing. Where the Crawdads Sing is at once a murder mystery, coming-of-age novel, and a celebration of nature. Set in time from 1952 to 1970, the story follows Kya Clarke. It is Kya’s story from aged six to 25 as she grows up in a North Carolina swamp after being abandoned by her family. After years of surviving alone, Kya pines for touch and love. As two boys from the local town become intrigued by her, she opens up to the idea of a new life. Until the unimaginable happens.

Restless. An espionage thriller that intertwines of the life story of Eva, a Russian woman living in Paris and former British spy, and her daughter Ruth, a single mother who teaches English as a foreign language. The book opens with Eva handing Ruth a memoir of her life as a young woman in World War II. What ensues is an exploration into buried secrets and identities.

The Architect’s Apprentice. This historical novel is set in sixteenth-century Istanbul and follows the young Jahan and a rare white elephant Chota. Jahan is escaping his abusive stepfather by pretending to be an elephant trainer. Spanning most of Jahan’s life, the pages are full of characters that Shafak has painstakingly researched in order to give the novel a vibrant and authentic feel.