NOVELIST
AIMEE BLACKLEDGE
Dark comedic historical fiction from seventeenth-century London
DEBUT NOVEL
Clouded in Clerkenwell
In 1641, two ambitious painters conceal their master's death and seize the studio, as England slides toward civil war. A dark comedic novel about ambition, deception, and the small lies that build a life.
This is not a pristine costume drama. But if you like your morally grey characters charming and root for them more than you should, then welcome to Clerkenwell. You'll fit right in.
Read the opening chapter by clicking below.
Join The Period Eye
Letters from a darker, stranger seventeenth century.
Once a month, I write from inside the world of Clouded in Clerkenwell. Explore a poison hidden in a paint box, a real anatomist and what he did next door, and the city of London on the eve of a war it didn't see coming.
Join, and I'll send you chapters two and three of Clouded in Clerkenwell to begin, then a letter each month. Subscribers are the first to know when the book is ready to read in full.
BEHIND THE NOVEL
Step into the world of the novel. Behind the story lies a London of poison and pigments, of anatomists and of stranger painters scrambling for a dead man’s throne.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aimee Blackledge writes darkly comedic historical fiction set in Early Modern Europe. As an art historian (DPhil, Oxford), she came to the period through doctoral research on painters and their material world, and stayed for the stories the archive doesn't tell.
Her poetry pamphlet Ghost Bones was described by T.S. Eliot Prize winner Joelle Taylor as 'inventive, exploratory, and necessary'.
Header image: Pieter Claesz, Vanitas Still Life with the Spinario, 1628. Oil on panel, 70.5 cm x 80.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Banner Image: After Rembrandt, A studio with an artist painting a double-portrait, c. 1645-50. Pen and brown ink with brown wash over graphite, 18.8 x 24.8 cm., British Museum, Department of Prints & Drawings, 1860,0616.128. Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.