![]() ![]() Not living with them are Isabel’s older brothers: Richard, who is married and lives at his own farm, and Geoffrey, Isabel’s favorite sibling, who has joined a monastery. Isabel lives in the small village of Ingleforn in a close and loving family: her father, Amabel, her beloved stepmother, Alice, nine-year-old brother, Ned, toddler sister, Margaret, and baby brother, Edmund. ![]() ![]() From this point on, Isabel tells her story in the present tense as though she is living through events. Fourteen-year-old Isabel looks back on the events of the year 1349. After killing tens of millions of people in Asia, the contagion made its way to Europe, where it would eventually go on to wipe out half the inhabitants. The novel is set during the deadliest disease outbreak in recorded history: the Black Death, which lasted from 1348-1350. Written in the first person and in the present tense, the story doesn’t shy away from the grimness of corpses, loss, hunger, and misery – but it also describes the rebuilding aftermath that shaped the course of human history. Through the point of view of a teenager living during this time, the novel delves into life in the feudal system, what it might have been like to cope with the scourge of a disease that wiped out almost half of the population, and the aftermath of this period of history. Sally Nicholls’s third young adult historical novel, All Fall Down (2012), is set during the middle of the fourteenth century in England, as the Black Death plague ravages Europe. ![]()
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