NOVELIST
AIMEE BLACKLEDGE
Darkly comedic historical fiction from seventeenth-century London
DEBUT NOVEL
Clouded in Clerkenwell
London, 1641. When their master dies in a studio accident, two ambitious painters conceal the body and seize the practice — only to find that an anatomist with too many questions, a widow with designs of her own, and a country sliding toward civil war make royal patronage rather harder to come by than they had imagined.
For readers of Ferdia Lennon's Glorious Exploits and A.K. Blakemore's The Glutton.
ABOUT AIMEE
I write darkly comedic historical fiction set in Early Modern Europe. As an art historian (DPhil, Oxford), I came to the period through doctoral research on painters and their material world, and stayed for the stories the archive doesn't tell.
My poetry pamphlet Ghost Bones was described by T.S. Eliot Prize winner Joelle Taylor as 'inventive, exploratory and necessary'.
THE PERIOD EYE
A newsletter on art, the Early Modern world, and the writing of historical fiction
Fortnightly essays on paintings, objects, and the texture of seventeenth-century life. Subscribers receive a prequel to Clouded in Clerkenwell.
Header image: Pieter Claesz, Vanitas Still Life with the Spinario, 1628. Oil on panel, 70.5 cm x 80.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.