Book Review - Francesca Multimortal by V C Peisker

 

Francesca Multimortal
By V.C. Peisker

Blurb:
If you'd already died five times, would you be scared to die again? If you lived six lives, what would you learn? One woman, six lives, five centuries. From Renaissance Italy and Amsterdam to revolutionary France and Russia, to Eastern Europe and finally Australia, Francesca is a woman of many times and places. Awaiting her final, natural death, 21st-century Francesca looks back on her previous lives with tough-minded clarity and humour, finding that there's always a price to pay for being her own woman. This novel in six novellas contemplates life, death, love, sex, gender, ageing, war and politics through a gallery of diverse characters deftly placed in a variety of historical settings. Francesca's lives and deaths will keep you reading till the end. Shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, 2023.

Review by Allan Jamieson:

VC Peisker (Val) has come up with a quite unusual theme for Francesca Multimortal,

her first novel. What's more, the end-result is a fascinating book; I could not put it

down until I reached the end AND I still cannot get the several female leads out of

my mind. It is a perfect example of Historical Fiction. Five females alive during turbulent

periods in history (i) 17th Century Sicily during the Spanish Inquisition; (ii) early 18th

Century in Amsterdam; late 18th Century in Avignon, during the Napoleonic wars

and the fightback by the Catholic Church; the late 19th Century in London and

Brighton during the time of Jack the Ripper; Leningrad in the 1930s during Stalin's

mass killings. All these female leads had the same name - Francesca - and they also sought

more out of life than what was thought to be the lot of women during their time.

Thus, they stuck their heads up and each one suffered a violent death as a result.