LoveReading4Kids Says
LoveReading4Kids Says
Shortlisted for the YA Book Prize 2024
Set in 1896, Yours From the Tower is a clever, compelling epistolary novel that dances with the magic of female friendship, romance, and thought-provoking presentations of its historic context. Told, in the main, through letters between three young women, this splendid story invites “then and now” comparisons as it reveals how restrictive life was for women in the late nineteenth-century, along with the era’s huge social divides.
After leaving boarding school, best friends Tirzah, Sophia and Polly are on the brink of leading disparate adult lives. This comes as a result of their very different backgrounds, and from them having very different personalities and dreams.
Sophia, whose ambitions of being a journalist have been quashed by dint of her being female, has been ushered into the London Season to find a rich husband — preferably a titled gentleman. Meanwhile, Polly is loving life teaching in an orphanage, finding fulfilment in making a difference to poor children who’ve been dealt terribly difficult starts in life. Then there’s flighty Tirzah. Tortuously frustrated by being forced to act as her strict grandmother’s unpaid companion, she makes a succession of rash decisions and harbours family secrets.
With Sophia, in particular, voicing thought-provoking statements on injustices of the age (“It is unfair, isn’t it? If we were men, there wouldn’t be any of this bother about marrying well. We could go off to university and become lawyers or clergymen or go into business… But what are my options if I do not find a husband?”), Yours From the Tower also tingles with romance while being underpinned by the nourishing power of female friendship.
It’s also peppered with wit, such as this whip-smart quip from Sophia when addressing one of her suitors, bohemian aristocrat Sebastian: “I think you and Helena are absurd to call a policemen capitalist scum, when he earns an honest living and you and she are the grandchildren of an earl.”
Joanne Owen
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About
Yours From the Tower Synopsis
1896. Tirzah, Sophia and Polly are best friends who’ve left boarding school and gone back to very different lives. Polly is teaching in an orphanage. Sophia is looking for a rich husband at the London Season. And Tirzah is stuck acting as an unpaid companion to her grandmother. In a series of letters, they share their hopes, their frustrations, their dramas ... and their romances. Can these three very different young women find happiness? '
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781839134814 |
| Publication date: |
4th July 2024 |
| Author: |
Sally Nicholls |
| Publisher: |
Andersen Press Ltd |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
368 pages |
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Press Reviews
Sally Nicholls Press Reviews
"An addictive, romantic epistolary novel" - Guardian
"I loved this book. An unputdownable friendship story told in letters so vivid and immersive that I felt like joining in with the correspondence" -- Hilary McKay
"Building on her previous historical fiction exploring the restrictions on women in society, the award-winning, always-excellent Sally Nicholls moves to the late Victorian era... This immersive, uplifting book is an absolute delight" - Irish Times
"With great affection and sympathy, these winning heroines forge their own paths in this highly readable, tautly paced work" -- starred review - Publishers Weekly
"The novel is heart-warming, intelligent and exciting, and thoroughly recommended for girls (and boys) hovering on the cusp of adolescence. I loved it" -- Philip Womack - Literary Review
Author
About Sally Nicholls
I was born in Stockton-on-Tees, just after midnight, in a thunderstorm. My father died when I was two, and my brother Ian and I were brought up my mother. I always wanted to write - when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I used to say "I'm going to be a writer" - very definite.
I've always loved reading, and I spent most of my childhood trying to make real life as much like a book as possible. My friends and I had a secret club like the Secret Seven, and when I was nine I got most of my hair cut off because I wanted to look like George in the Famous Five. I was a real tomboy - I liked riding my bike, climbing trees and building dens in our garden. And I liked making up stories. I used to wander round my school playground at break, making up stories in my head.
I went to two secondary schools - a little Quaker school in North Yorkshire (where it was so cold that thick woolly jumpers were part of the school uniform) and a big comprehensive. I was very lonely at the little school, but I made friends at the comprehensive and got on all right. I didn't like being a teenager very much, though.
After school, I got to be an adult, which was fantastic. I went and worked in a Red Cross Hospital in Japan and then travelled around Australia and New Zealand. I jumped off bridges and tall buildings, climbed Mount Doom, wore a kimono and went to see a ballet in the Sydney Opera House. Then I came back and did a degree in Philosophy and Literature at Warwick. In my third year, realising with some panic that I was now supposed to earn a living, I enrolled in a masters in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa. It was here that I wrote Ways to Live Forever. I also won the prize for the writer with most potential, through which I got my agent. Four months later, I had a publisher.
I now live in a little house in Oxford, writing stories, and trying to believe my luck.
Photo credit Barrington Stoke website
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A Letter from the Author:
Dear Readers,
Yours From the Tower is set in 1896 and 1897, at the very end of Queen Victoria’s reign. This is not the Victoriana of Charles Dickens, big crinolines, and boys up chimneys. Children in the UK have been entitled to a primary education since the 1870s. Sherlock Holmes is using the science of deduction to solve crimes in 221B Baker Street, and HG Wells’ Martians are landing in Woking. The world’s first escalator is installed in Coney Island. In Augsburg, Rudolf Diesel is demonstrating his Diesel engine. The word ‘computer’ is first used to describe a calculating machine, and in Sweden, Svante Arrhenius becomes the first person to predict that burning greenhouse gases will cause global temperatures to rise. On the 13th of May 1897, the first wireless transmission is sent across the sea. Its message, appropriately enough: “Are you ready?”
We are right at the earliest beginnings of the modern age, an exciting time to be a British man or woman. But social norms, as ever, are lagging behind scientific progress. As I write this, a law has been passed in twenty-first century England and Wales raising the marriage age to eighteen. But in 1896, it is common practice for upper-class girls of seventeen to ‘do a Season’ and find a marriage partner. A girl who fails to find a husband after several Seasons faces a doubtful future. Although women can of course marry later, her life if she does not find a husband is likely to be limited to staying at home and keeping house for her parents. For middle-class girls, a few more options are available: she might teach or nurse or become a paid companion. Working-class women could become servants, factory workers, washerwomen, seamstresses or shop-girls. But most universities will not give women a degree. Small numbers of women are beginning to enter the professions as doctors and lawyers. But they are rare. There are no women engineers. Few female scientists. British women will not win the right to vote for another twenty years.
Yours From the Tower is the story of three girls, Sophia, Polly and Tirzah, who come of age in this period of excitement and frustration. It’s a book about limits and restriction. It’s also a love story – three, in fact. But most of all, it’s a story about female friendship, and its power to liberate and transform. Thank you for picking up this book and reading it. I love all three of these girls dearly.
I hope you’ll love them too.
Yours, in nervous expectation,
Sally Nicholls
