Spanning Gilded Age New York society to the 1930s Scottish Highlands, this gothic novel is a mystery within a mystery, featuring a compelling heroine, an engrossing puzzle with fiendish clues, and not one but three big twists.
It's 1932: Scottish adventuress and plant-hunter (and surviving twin) Emily Blackwood, now living in Australia, accepts a commission from Heinrich Vogel, a former dealer of exotic animals in Manhattan. Vogel now lives with his macabre collection of taxidermy in a remote Scottish castle. Emily is tasked with finding a long-lost treasure that Heinrich believes has been hidden within the castle walls. But instead, she discovers the pages of a diary written by Hester Vogel, who died after falling from the Brooklyn Bridge on the eve of its opening in 1883. Hester's diary leads Emily to an old book, The Birdcage Library, and into a treasure hunt of another kind-one that will take her down a dangerous path for clues, and force her to confront her own darkest secret . . . Freya Berry studied English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating with honors, and worked for several years as a financial and political journalist at Reuters and then the Daily Mail. The Dictator's Wife, her debut novel, was inspired by the close observation of the wives of some of the world's most powerful leaders. It was a BBC2 Between the Covers pick and shortlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel award. The Birdcage Library was an Amazon UK Book of the Year 2023 Editor's Pick. Berry is British-Indian and lives in London. EXCERPT
Welcome, dear reader. You have found me, and I you. The diary you hold in your hands is a treasure map. It will lead you to what you ought to seek. Like all such maps, the trail is cryptic. The reason for this is simple. The man I love is trying to kill me.
Chapter One
Every life has its own lie. I think of them as like plants – lies, I mean; doubtless this is due to my botanist's profession. Some are tame and neat: cottage garden geraniums, sprucing up the exterior. Others are subtler, wilier, their roots sunk deep.
There is a third kind: the creepers, the vines. Plants of the jungle. Parasites. Lovingly they reach up and in, entwining themselves with their host, slowly but surely leaching its life away.
The train snaked up Scotland's west flank, coiling through the peaks of Argyll, winding its way around Loch Linnhe. The landscape grew bleaker, green bowing to red bracken not dissimilar in color to my hair. My skin gleamed pale in the window-paler since our arrival. My father and I had spent seven years absorbing the Australian sun, only for it to disperse in a matter of weeks. I felt guilty for leaving him, though I could hardly have refused the fortuitous employment offer I'd received.
The train was a rickety-looking thing with an air of frontier bravado. I'd changed onto it at Glasgow and made sure to request my stop with the gaunt conductor, as my new employer had directed in his letter. The handwriting was elegant, flared.
"They're all request stops here, Miss …"
"Blackwood. Emily Blackwood."
He nodded bleakly, returning my ticket as a bishop dispenses a wafer to a sinner. His lugubriousness was at odds with the countryside's vaulting magnificence, but it seeped in as we left tourist country with its viaducts and waterfalls, pretty train stations and tamed lochs; the winding roads that led nowhere and the white crofters' cottages pebbling the bracken like roc's eggs in a giant nest. The sky outside grew greyer, draped over humpbacked hills that somehow both crouched and loomed; the stations grew smaller, or perhaps the hills reared higher. This far north, nature had different rules. I saw it in the passengers: iron under their skin. It was easy to believe that wolves had lived here once, sleek shadows winding through the pines.
