When tragedy strikes, and her father is found dead under suspicious circumstances, Faith determines to find out the cause of his death as well as to discover the nature of his scientific investigations, hoping, in the process, to save the family name and fortune. Faith discovers that the underlying motive for this abrupt move is to escape the growing scandal around the vicar’s recently published scientific findings. The Lie Tree, Hardinge’s seventh novel, opens with the Sunderly family decamping from Kent to the isolated island of Vale. Little wonder that her frustration manifests itself in behaviour that is not always strictly ladylike. As a doctor and keen craniometrist tells her (with regard to the inferior size of the female skull and, ergo, intelligence), “too much intellect would spoil and flatten like a rock in a soufflé”. Faith is hungry for knowledge and experience, yet she is constantly thwarted by the age and society into which she has been born. Do you understand?” So says the Reverend Erasmus Sunderly – gentleman scientist and Victorian patriarch – to Faith, his clever and devoted teenage daughter, who longs to follow in his footsteps and study natural science.

A girl cannot be brave, or clever, or skilled as a boy can.

In this dark, quasi-historical, quasi-fantastical tale, which is set in a post- Origin of the Species 19th century, Hardinge riffs on the themes of women’s place in society, evolution, nature and nurture, and the anatomy of lying. She is a writer who delights in language, and whose stories fizz with ideas, allusions and eccentric detail. T here is no mistaking the distinctive voice and vividly crafted prose of Frances Hardinge.

The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge