Product Description

Born into direst poverty in 1820s Liverpool, Linny Gow escapes the life of prostitution her stepfather has forced her into, learns how to be a young lady, and flees to India, where the British Raj is in its infancy. There she finds heartache and suffering, but also true love and -perhaps most important of all - freedom. A hugely compelling novel which heralds an exciting new talent in women's fiction, The Linnet Bird is a once-in-a-lifetime read.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2021050 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

About the Author
Linda Holeman is the author of six books for children and young adults, and two collections of short stories for adults, both of which have won her numerous awards in her native Canada. This is her first novel. She has three children and lives in Winnipeg.

Customer Reviews

I will write it all, part truth, part memory, and nightmare
Author, Linda Holeman vividly brings to life the sights, sounds and, smells of two very different worlds. From the gruesome poverty of working class Liverpool, with its squalor and stink, to the evocative, and multihued colour of India under British colonial rule, the author has created a vast sweeping melodramatic saga, a startling portrait of Victorian life that is almost of Dickensian proportions.

Narrated in the first person and set during the 1830's - a period of ever-increasing colonial expansion - The Linnet Bird tells the story of the resourceful Linny Gow. Born and raised on Back Phoebe Anne Street, Liverpool, with its fog, gulls, and grey shifting light over the stretching windswept emptiness of water, the young girl grows up in poverty with the "smell of the Mersey constantly in her nostrils." Linny is forced into prostitution at the age of eleven, embarking on a life fraught with danger, fear, and perpetual filth.

It's not long before Linny is brutally stabbed and tossed into the Mersey River after escaping from the clutches of a syphilis-ridden maniac. Found by fishermen, she returns to the only life she knows, this time taking up a station on Paradise Street under the kindly supervision of a madam. But life is tough, and the men treat her terribly, to them she's nothing more than a dirty, unclean harlot.

But Linny continually thinks about a new life - a different life, "where nobody knew me and where I could start over." She knows it might be her only chance to avoid ending up like the other girls she works with and she realizes just how badly she needs to leave it all - "the damp rooms on Jack Street and the cold, wet streets that fan out from Paradise in an endless maze of dark alleys filled with drunken, smelly customers. "

A series of catastrophic events ensure that Linny gets her wish, and she eventually falls into the care of Shaker Smallpiece, a kindly and would-be physician. Shaker offers Linny a new life, getting her a job in a library and even giving her a fabricated identity as his cousin. However, Shaker's puritanical mother resents that her son has brought into the house an immoral woman who she sees as representing the worlds of prostitution and crime, and who makes light of her concepts of respectability, purity, and prudery.

To Mrs. Smallpiece, Linny is no more than a rouged and apolloed strumpet, a desperate bedraggled creature who blusters on with her pathetic stories of lost dreams. Eventually, however, Mrs. Smallpiece weakens and hesitatingly offers Linny lessons in etiquette - "the tedious etiquette for the parlor, etiquette for social calls, and etiquette for meeting acquaintances on the street." Soon Linny's transformation from a street harlot into a sophisticated society lady begins to take shape.

Yet Linny still feels unsettled, and realizing that "there can be no going forward, after all, without the look back over one's shoulder," she travels to India, with Faith, her best friend, eventually making a home for herself in Calcutta. Linny is besotted with the chaos of this new world and seeks to immerse herself in the fetid alleys and torturous lanes, the twisting underbelly of Calcutta.

But as Linny traversed the ocean in the hope of starting a new life, she discovers that she cannot escape her dark past. Somers Ingram, a young, enigmatic businessman becomes her husband, but he also becomes her archrival and her nemesis, forcing her into an arranged marriage with him against her will. Ingram soon emerges as the cruelest and most dastardly of villains.

Gritty, provocative, and lushly imagined, The Linnet Bird paints a portrait of a young woman desperately trying to survive in a man's world. Linny must lie, cheat, beg, and steal, while almost constantly maintaining her guard. It's a time where Victorian moral Puritanism is its peak and where the unforgiving, narrow-minded attitudes of the British society ladies would immediately ostracize her if they new the truth. Meanwhile, Linny is appalled at their judgmental, stifling outlook and their determination to reinforce the English traditions even more strongly in India than at home.

Linny is always an actor, a player on the stage. She's also a fighter who rails against the troubling sense of captivity that men have tried foster on her. All the men she meets have wanted something: whether its the endless stream of customers; Ram, her first pimp, using her for the easy coins he didn't have to work for; Shaker wanting love in a smotheringly needy way; Somers wanting his inheritance and a cover for his lifestyle, and perhaps someone to bully.

It isn't until she meets Daoud a dashingly handsome Pashtan nomad that she becomes richer, her life almost becoming unreal, far off and blurred "as the waves of heat that rose from the plains under the Indian sun." Perhaps it is with Daoud, a man who seemingly wants for nothing, that she will be able to find true happiness.

At the end of the story, Linny is momentarily saddened when she thinks over her tumultuous life. At first she sees it as a disaster - a litany of errors small and huge, of lies and constant deception. But the memory of the copper sun, of the Kashmir valley, and of the passion and completeness she felt with Daoud stays with her. Perhaps then, the violence, the lies, and Linny's incredible adventures from one world to another have not been in vain. Mike Leonard July 05.

Excellent Read
So real,fiction that touches every nerve. totally glued,
Loved it.

A great read...
This book is an incredible read, exploring themes in Victorian society that many readers believe only exist in the 21st century e.g. rape, under-age sex, drugs, murder, child prostitution, contract marriages, domestic violence and adultery. Holeman somehow manages to combine all these into a very tight plot. This is a journey of a girl that starts before you pick up the book & you have feeling she'll be back. Linny is no Elizabeth Bennet in her terms of character strength but she is a street fighter ready to take on the world just to escape the slums. The let down in this book had to be the love-making scenes. They seem stiff and awkward other than that it was good. I know it's not a romance novel but come on! As a reader we are meant to understand the characters' emotions and the events that are happening to them. Sorry on that point she kind of let it slide.