Naming the Birds

While attempting to buy Christmas presents in the local Mall, Mark, an art-historian, sees and follows a girl into a second-hand bookshop. She has vanished - but in the window is a paperback bible with Blake's picture, 'Eve Naming the Birds', as cover design. Recognizing the likeness to the girl he has just followed, he tries to buy the book, but finds it not for sale. Further research reveals that no such cover-design was apparently ever produced. Returning to the Mall, he finds the bookshop has itself disappeared. From a door in another shop, he finds himself in Felpham in 1803, temporary home of William Blake - and meets the girl again, who admits that she was indeed Blake's model for Eve. Her unexplained gifts for time-travel are now, however, a threat to herself. There follows a series of mysterious, uncontrolled, and disturbing juxtapositions between modern and early nineteenth-century England - climaxing both in a meeting with Blake, and, more alarmingly, a local lynch-mob. Moreover, what has all this to do with the prophet Jeremiah, whose Michelangelo portrait is now the official bible cover? or with Mr Glass, a night-club and gallery owner, who seems to want to give away original Blake sketches ? This is a contemporary love-story, involving time-travel, art-history, and unexpected twists and shifts of power and perspective - not to mention the fate of the missing drawings for William Hayley's library at the Turret in Felpham.

Stephen Prickett has spent far too many hours drinking cappuccinos in shopping malls; he also knows what happened to the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics Bible -- after he recommended Eve for the cover. He does not advise citing St Jerome as a referee.