The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

Gerald Candless has spent his career as a beloved novelist, but after his sudden death, his daughter Sarah begins writing his biography and discovers that everything she knew about her father's past is a construction. The man who raised her left behind a different name, a different history, and a London murder that has been quietly attributed to someone else for decades. Ruth Rendell, writing as Barbara Vine, uses the literary biography as a form of excavation, the novelist's skills turned on the novelist's life with unsettling precision.

Jenny Sterlin's narration handles the dual temporal structure with clarity and emotional precision, her performance distinguishing the contemporary Sarah and the reconstructed past without losing the thread of either. At just under sixteen hours, The Chimney Sweeper's Boy rewards the patience its complexity requires, the slowly revealed portrait of Gerald Candless building toward a denouement that reframes everything that preceded it. This is Rendell at her most literary and most morally exacting.