Most novels that alternate the story between historical then and now fail to balance the reader’s interest. Now is so much more humdrum, particularly when it’s rooted around modern marriage and adultery. Tracy Chevalier’s first novel brings it off triumphantly. The unfamiliar setting of the French Wars of Religion and the familiar scenario of a contemporary American couple in France are plaited together by region, ancestry and a certain heredity of enquiry. Ella Turner settles in provincial France with her husband Rick and is troubled by recurring dreams involving a Renaissance cobalt blue and the unfamiliar lines of a sixteenth century prayer. This starts her on a quest for the history of the French line of her family, centring on Isabelle du Moulin, kown as La Rousse because of her red hair, a farmer’s daughter forced to abandon her Roman Catholic upbringing – that blue is the colour of the Virgin Mary’s robe – and flee from the aftermath of the Saint Bartholomew’s Massacre.
     Like Ella, Isabelle is experience in midwifery and yearns to escape her marriage. Ella, on her trail through the archives, falls heavily for the local librarian, Jean-Paul, and her hair turns red. All this could be so much romantic twaddle, but the writing is so stripped of indulgence and the events are so clearly seen that one surrenders. Provincial life, superstition, gossip and malice are precisely caught, and the related women protagonists lodge in the mind. Excellent.