Blog tour: Fayne

Welcome to the blog tour for Fayne by Ann-Marie MacDonald!

More about the book…

In the late nineteenth century, Charlotte Bell is growing up at Fayne, a vast and lonely estate straddling the border between England and Scotland, where she has been kept from the world by her adoring father, Lord Henry Bell, owing to a mysterious ‘condition’.

Charlotte, strong and insatiably curious, revels in the moorlands, and has learned the treacherous and healing ways of the bog from the old hired man, Byrn, whose own origins are shrouded in mystery. Her idyllic existence is shadowed by the magnificent portrait on the landing in Fayne House which depicts her mother, a beautiful Irish-American heiress, holding Charlotte’s brother, Charles Bell. Charlotte has grown up with the knowledge that her mother died in giving birth to her, and that her older brother, Charles, the long-awaited heir, died at the age of two. When Charlotte’s appetite for learning threatens to exceed the bounds of the estate, her father breaks with tradition and hires a tutor to teach his daughter ‘as you would my son, had I one’.

But when Charlotte and her tutor’s explorations of the bog turn up an unexpected artefact, her father announces he has arranged for her to be cured of her condition, and her world is upended. Charlotte’s passion for knowledge and adventure will take her to the bottom of family secrets and to the heart of her own identity.

In Fayne we meet an irresistible young queer character whose curiosity and joy collide with the frustratingly arbitrary gender dichotomies in the world. Even with all her gifts–intelligence, wit and strength of character–can Charlotte overcome the violently enforced boundaries of society to claim her own place in the world?

More about the author…

Ann-Marie MacDonald is a novelist, playwright, actor, and broadcast host. She was born in the former West Germany. After graduating from the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal, she moved to Toronto where she distinguished herself as an actor and playwright. Her first play won the Governor General’s Award, the Chalmers Award and the Canadian Authors’ Association Award. In 1996, her first novel Fall on Your Knees became an international bestseller, was translated into nineteen languages and sold three million copies. It won the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Fiction, the People’s Choice Award and the Libris Award. In 2002, it became an Oprah’s Book Club title. In 2003, The Way the Crow Flies appeared, and in 2014, Adult Onset, both of which also enjoyed immense international success. In 2019 Ann-Marie MacDonald was made an Officer of the Order of Canada for her contribution to the arts and her LGBTQ2+ activism. She is married to theatre director, Alisa Palmer, with whom she has two children.

My impressions…

‘I knew from a very young age that I was wrong in the world. And the idea of looking through the eyes of somebody who’s born with an intersex trait has been quite compelling to me for a very long time. It’s not an exotic quality. That’s why I’ve decided not to treat it as a “spoiler”. That’s just who Charlotte is, that’s her body. That’s normal. It’s the world that has a problem and is going to make it a problem for her’ - ANN-MARIE MACDONALD

I think that, more than anything I could ever say to push this book into your hands, the author quote above is all you need to be convinced of the amazing nature of this novel. When asked if I might be interested in reviewing Fayne, it was described to me as ‘a queer coming-of-age story set in the Scottish Borders in Victorian times, with a central character who is born with an intersex trait’, and I thought I won the jackpot!

I tend to steer clear of big books because my children don’t leave me much reading time, but I am happy that I didn’t get frightened by its 700+ pages and took this on. Charlotte’s experience of life is unlike anything I’ve known, and it both made me smile and tear up. She is an extraordinary character, and extraordinary is also the landscaped which she moves in. An evocative and unforgettable novel, I highly recommend reading it.

Three words to describe it. Moving. Atmospheric. Engrossing.

Do I like the cover? Yes, it suits the novel.

Have I read any other books by the same author? No, but I’m running to check her back catalogue!