Wednesday, December 15, 2010

What is Richard Harvell reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Richard Harvell, author of The Bells, a novel about a castrato in the eighteenth century.

His entry begins:
I’m currently reading Michael Newton’s Savage Girls and Wild Boys. I actually found it by entering “Wild Boys” into the local university library catalogue, and it’s just what I hoped it would be—a history of feral children, from wolf-children to the tragically neglected.

I find my way into the novels I write through other people’s carefully researched studies of out of the ordinary themes—for The Bells it was Patrick Babier’s The World of the Castrati (as well as the somewhat less scholarly Castration: The Advantages and Disadvantages, by Victor T. Cheney).

Newton’s Savage Girls and Wild Boys is just the kind of book that sets me tingling as I stroll the library stacks. The book satisfies my thirst for...[read on]
Among the praise for The Bells:
"Harvell has written an entertaining and eye-opening aria of a book."
Washington Post

"The Bells does for the ears what Perfume did for the nose. A novel to engage the senses as well as tickle the mind."
—Sarah Dunant, international bestselling author of Sacred Hearts

"Wrenching and painfully triumphant.... A poignant and acutely told story of the human spirit; highly recommended."
Library Journal

"Astonishing in its originality, epic in its scope, luminous in its richness, The Bells is a novel to be savored page by glorious page."
—Cathy Marie Buchanan, New York Times bestselling author of The Day the Falls Stood Still
Visit Richard Harvell's website.

Writers Read: Richard Harvell.

--Marshal Zeringue