Nicola Morgan

 

 
 

NICOLA MORGAN

Fleshmarket

cover - Fleshmarket

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Voted by Teen Titles as one of the best teenage novels of all time
Shortlisted for the North Lanarkshire Award
Winner of a Scottish Arts Council prize
ALA Best Young Adult Books 2005
Shortlisted for the NorthEast Book Award
Various other shortlistings

Fleshmarket is set in the 1820s in Edinburgh, a city of cruel contrasts between the lives of the rich and poor, and home to the infamous Burke and Hare, who sold their murder victims to brilliant anatomist Dr Robert Knox. This is the evocative, often harrowing story of a boy who must survive the pain of his mother’s death, at the hands of Doctor Knox.

Fleshmarket is probably my best-known book. Many schools use it as a class reader, partly because of the accurate and vivid portrayal of real life in Soctland in the gruesome 19th century, but mainly because it’s a story that so many young people seem to enjoy. It’s equally for boys and girls, but many boys who didn’t think they liked reading have said they have changed their minds after Fleshmarket. That’s the best response I could possibly have wished for! If you’re studying Fleshmarket in school, do ask me any questions and if I visit your school I will tell you the real stories that inspired it. If you dare!

A Few Reviews - Fleshmarket has been widely reviewed and you will find lots more on-line.

The Glasgow Herald
"This book grabs you and never lets you go."

The Bookseller
"Outstanding ... a book that deserves attention."

The Sunday Telegraph
"A gripping and intelligent read."

David Almond
"A dramatic and thought-provoking book. Nicola Morgan is a fine writer."

Lindsey Fraser in the Guardian
"This is a tough thriller, a delicate love story and a powerfully evocative historical novel. At its heart is a young man’s obsession with the mother he lost under horrendous, bizarre circumstances. Set in Edinburgh at a time in which the city was at the vanguard of medical advance, Morgan reveals the deep moral dilemmas that accompanied meaningful research at the time. Her descriptions of Edinburgh’s Old Town, decaying, corrupt and dangerous, are extraordinarily vivid. Lives were cheap, both within and out of the medical faculty. Morgan is a confident, courageous and honest writer. Fleshmarket is a tour de force, from its attention-grabbing prologue onwards."

Sunday Young Post
"Novel beginnings are seldom more dramatic or more grim than the first 10 pages of Nicola Morgan’s Fleshmarket. This is sweat-on-the-forehead stuff. In the startling introduction to her story, Morgan, an uncompromising writer who doesn’t believe in holding back, takes you straight to the painful centre of what is to follow and leaves you gasping. Fleshmarket is well and truly a book that thrills, but behind the rip-roaring plot there is a painful truth that none of us should ever forget. This is an important book that lives up to the expectations of its evocative title and dramatic cover. Stories don’t come any more powerful than this."

David Robinson in The Scotsman
"Ordinarily, Nicola Morgan is a particularly logical woman. Most of the time, when she’s writing educational textbooks (65 so far, many of them best-sellers) she has to be. Showing children how to grasp the first principles of language or mathematics, knowing exactly how those first building blocks of knowledge have to be shifted around inside a four-year-old’s mind, depends upon it.

"So you’re not particularly surprised to discover that she studied classics and philosophy at Cambridge, or that she’s the type of person who puts a note on the fridge door saying the pt was bought on Tuesday so must be eaten by Thursday. And being logical, she is also precise, punctual and organised - all of which tend not to be writerly characteristics.

"Yet in her first novel, a year ago, this ultra-logical, controlled, ordered writer was describing a character as having "hair as long as the sound of honey", using language rich in the kind of metaphors that would make a Mr Spock raise his Vulcan eyebrows. Verbs were often dropped and replaced by adjectives, nouns rammed together to create new compounds or wildly unstructured sentences. Writing the book, she says, allowed her to be "a little bit crazy".
But that novel, Mondays Are Red, was about a boy who wakes up from a coma to discover he has synaesthesia, a condition in which the senses are muddled so words can be heard as colours, sights as smells and so on. So, far from jarring, the controlled anarchy of Morgan’s style reflected its subject. The book marked out the Dalkeith writer as someone to watch - not least to find out whether she could adjust her style could to any less esoteric subject.

"She can, and does. In her latest novel, Fleshmarket, she tackles the quintessentially Edinburgh story of Burke and Hare, who murdered 16 people in order to supply bodies for surgeon Dr Robert Knox to use in his anatomy classes - or as the ditty of the time put it more succinctly: "Burke the butcher/ Hare the thief/And Knox the boy who buys the beef." She succeeds so brilliantly that it’s almost impossible not to imagine the book figuring heavily in next year’s teen fiction awards."

Reading Matters website
"It’s a vivid and compelling story, saturated with gruesome images of poverty and squalor in nineteenth century Edinburgh. But you’ll also find a satisfying emotional journey, and some interesting ethical points along the way, all still relevant to current developments in medicine. Highly recommended!"

Liv, aged 16
"This book is one of the very few on my list of favourites. It’s gripping, realistic, sad, exciting and historically accurate. Robbie is an amazing character that really pulls you in. Really is a GREAT READ."




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