Elizabethan London is brought to life in this ambitious and dazzling book by Mat Osman.
Shay, a follower of a bird worshipping sect is heartsick after the death of her mother and feeling the responsibility of being a seer escapes to the world of a theatre troop "the Blackfriars boys. She finds love in the charismatic press-ganged lead actor Nonesuch who dreams of his own escape into his own company The Ghost Theatre.
Osman skillfully combines real and imagined history and place, balancing lyrical description without sugarcoating the grim realities of life with action. I didn't expect to enjoy this as much as I did, not being a fan of magic realism but I was gripped from start to finish. Thank you so much the publisher and netgallery for supplying a review copy.

Unfortunately, I didn't finish this book. I persevered for as long as I could but the plot didn't capture my imagination and I found it hard to connect with the characters. I did, however enjoy the descriptions of the settings and the wr6was good.. Thanks to Mat Osman and Bloomsbury for the advance copy

A brilliant fantasy read. A dive into a London long gone. In the 17th century in London what would you do as a child to survive? What if you might have the magic to tell the future? The Ghost Theatre, in building or out in the sticks might be for you. But watch out because money talks, and not everyone has your best interests in mind. People will pay for the performance, but what are you willing to give up? Thank you to Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (UK and ANZ) and NetGalley for the ARC. The views expressed are all mine freely given.

Shay's story is set in Elizabethan England and I found her a fascinating character, really well drawn. I enjoyed the novel and would recommend it as a good read. Thank you to netgalley and the publishers for giving me a copy of the book.

I loved the setting of this light urban historical fantasy. The idea of bird divinity and divination was cool and interesting. The two main characters were compelling, however the stop start nature of the plot was difficult to follow. This is a shame as all the ingredients were there for a compelling read.

I just reviewed The Ghost Theatre by Mat Osman. #TheGhostTheatre #NetGalley

Wow! This is a beautiful piece of work by May Osman and I’ve been glued to this book all afternoon. (Easter holidays!)

The way the author uses words is beautifully poetic. Shakespeare lovers will adore this story of Shay and Nonesuch with their Ghost Theatre.

This author really stretches your imagination with this story of love, loss, cruelty, loyalty and friendship.

It was the title and the cover design that sparked my interest.

I was hoping for a fantasy novel, and when I first started reading, that was what it felt like. As I carried on reading, however, I found it didn't really fill the craving for a fantasy novel in the way that I'd first hoped. I didn't really connect with the protagonist or any of the other characters.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for a free copy to review.

This is an honest view in exchange for an ARC.
Set in Elizabethan London, the description of this novel immediately appealed to me. The Ghost Theatre is beautifully written and full of vivid imagery that attempts to capture the striking but grim landscape of the city. Some passages are so striking it is almost immersive at times. That said I feel there was something missing for me and while Shay was a wonderful protagonist and I loved her relationship with Devana and the symbolism for the bird, I just found the middle of the book a bit of a slog. I found it pulled me out of the story after so much work drawing you in to it.
I don't think this one hit the right notes for me but I will say the epilogue made me very happy.

A very different book from Mat's first one, but incredibly striking nonetheless! A collection of characters that are unique and with depth, some great description and, but for a spot of meandering through the middle, a fascinating tale! I was lucky enough to get this as an ARC through Netgalley in exchange for my fair and honest review

This captivating and beautifully written book charts the lives of Shay and Nonesuch just as the blurb says. In three Acts, clearly delineated sections of the 'theatre' plays a central part. I was quite ready for the break each time. I found that the depths in which London of 1601/2 is portrayed to be sickening at times especially the degradation which the young actors were subjected to.

Having said that, the way that Mat Osman writes the Ghost Theatre is a masterpiece. I just wished he got all of his Elizabethan landmarks correct. In particular the 'spire' of St Pauls was only built after the cathedral was destroyed in the 1666 Great Fire. Before that it had a tower and that was the landmark that Shay should have been pointing out each time. Otherwise most of the tangle of city streets that he describes, especially from the rooftops, rings true with the rough thatch, no alleyways, and the ordure. Birds play a major part, brilliantly described.

Osman's imagination, especially of costume and revelry, and his descriptive powers, will delight most wordsmiths. I'm not convinced it has a plot, or not one I engaged with, anyway.

For the most part I very much enjoyed this novel. Set in Elizabethan London it tells the story of Shay, a teenager, a trainer of hawks and part time messenger who gets involved with the members of a child theatre group run by the evil, Evans. At first Shay believes she is as free as the birds that are sacred to her family and people, but as the story progresses she finds her reeled in, caged, and forced to perform on demand.
Mat Osman manages to create and describe a vivid city, in which you can smell the river and the dirt, taste the spit roasted meats, and shiver in the cold on the frozen Thames. The journeys Shay and Nonesuch make across the roofs take the reader on a wild ride and the details of the pyrotechnics used in the theatre light up the seedy and abusive side of the city.
I very much enjoyed the plot, the love between Nonesuch and Shay, the uprising of the prentices, the attack on the monarchy, and I like the characters, especially the down to earth Alouette and the diver and costume maker, Blank.
My main problem with the book was that it didn't seem to know whether it was real or fantastical and fluttered between the two all the way through. I would have been happy with either, but this was a bit of a mismash, unsure of which side of the fence it eventually wanted to settle.
But I enjoyed the read and the ride, and loved the historical elements. With thanks to Netgalley, Bloomsbury Publishing and the author for an arc copy in return for an honest review.

Thank you to the author, publishers Bloomsbury Publishing and NetGalley UK for access to this as an advance reader’s ebook. This is an honest and voluntary review.

A beautifully told story of life, hope, love, betrayal, tragedy and death.

Shay dresses as a boy so that she can scale the rooftops as a fleet of foot messenger. Freeing birds which are sacred to her and her people, she meets Nonesuch, a charismatic actor and star of the Blackfriars Boys troupe. His silver tongue and passion for life sweep her with him and the magic of the theatre. Then as Shay comes into her hereditary powers to read the flightpaths of the flocking sparrows, her skills begin to attract the attention of the London elite and everyone wants to own her.

Set in Elizabethan England this books blends fantasy and reality seamlessly. The otherworldliness of Shay’s Aviscultan root, where birds are gods and gods are birds, seems almost normal. Or at least barely offsets the darkness of a seedy London where the rich use and abuse the young people of the theatre.

At one point I thought the bird magic elements would be more dominant, but as this strand of the story emerged it was clear that it needed to be no more than a backdrop to Shay and Nonesuch’s story. It is in hope and fear for them that the heart if this tale resides, and the author handles the light and dark of their relationship masterfully.

The style of writing wasn't for me unfortunately. I have a cognitive disability and found this too convoluted to get into or follow properly.

I enjoyed the world-building of an other-worldly Elizabethan London, and Osman writes well about performance - it's a theme as well as part of the action - but at a sentence level, the language was too convoluted and dense, and I felt that it kept me at arm's length from the action. Ironically given its rich detail it wasn't as immersive as I wanted it to be.

On first reading the synopsis for The Ghost Theatre I was extremely intrigued. I love a good historical fiction novel and I also grew up doing theatre so this sounded right up my alley.

I really like the way Osman writes setting. The Elizabethan London he recreated felt very immersive. I enjoyed the theatrical element a lot, with the creation of The Ghost Theatre making me feel as if I were part of the audience too.

The connection between Shay and the birds (particularly Devana) was also very well written and it helped me to understand the protagonist better.

Unfortunately The Ghost Theatre didn't quite meet the expectations I had for it and it felt very much like Osman was trying to do way too much with not enough pages. I almost wished this were longer so it could have had the space to properly develop as the plot felt quite choppy and surface level in parts.

I thought, although improved later on, that Shay's character just seemed rather passive in the first half and so that made it difficult to connect with her.

Overall I thought this was a great concept with brilliant descriptions and a book that people will enjoy. I just don't think it was really for me.

What an outlier the Osman family is, where Suede's towering bassist is neither 'the tall one' nor 'the one who was famous from another medium before turning novelist'. Still, he makes a pretty good go of it all the same, here conjuring up an Elizabethan London which feels solid in all its filth and splendour. So much historical fiction is happy with a flat costume drama feel, a this'll-do approximation, but The Ghost Theatre brings it to life with the details of fashionable attire, the stench of the city, the sheer bustling life of streets where "In ten minutes' walking they heard five languages, twenty accents", where silks from India compete for space with Dutch merchants and Seville oranges – though just when this feels like a rejoinder to the neverland of Brexit nostalgia, there's the sly detail of said fruit being "labelled, hopefully, Moriqo, so that buyers' patriotism wouldn't be questioned." Ever a world city, yet ever uneasy with that – Osman gets London, which I think may be even more important than period detail in the writing of a London historical. Not that this is exactly our history – the trained wolves in the opening chase made me think of The Wolves Of Willoughby Chase, and I'd say that's a decent guide to how far off our timeline Osman's taken us. Although the main difference comes from one of the protagonists' background in a bird cult based in the Wapping marshes. Their name, the Aviscultans, feels a little will-this-do, but I was more concerned that in creating a semi-detached outsider tribe associated with fortune-telling, the book was trying to swap in substitute Gypsies who were less likely to draw flak than if actual Gypsies had been used, which feels...awkward. Still, they do provide a route towards some lovely writing about birds, even if it tends also to be self-doubting: "The paucity of language infuriated Shay. How to express the audacity of a magpie's tail-feathers or the cruelty of an eagle's beak? What words could capture a hummingbird's unlikeliness, or cage a hawk's talons?"

The unevenness continue as the Aviscultan – or, to the vulgar, 'flapper' – lead Shay becomes increasingly entangled with the boy-player Nonesuch (a Nicholas Hoult role if ever I saw one, though he's too old for this now). The idea of whole theatre troupes of adolescents, reputed to include snatched scions of nobility, is an evocative one, a McLaren-esque Lost Boys fantasy even as it acknowledges the sinister edge to that whole notion, with the theatre's patrons feeling thoroughly entitled to its stars: "The private masques tend to be more...improvised than that. More...um..audience-led." And where once I might have cavilled at the heavy-handed representation of the dynamic between haves and have-nots, these days it barely even needs the veneer of alternate history to feel like a straight description: "It's not enough that they have more than us. So much more than us. They want us to have nothing. They ruin us over and over again and then they despise us for our poverty." The problem is more that Nonesuch and Shay embark on a series of capers where, as they escalate, it's increasingly obvious that it's all going to blow up in their faces. Now, heavens know this is not exactly implausible for teenagers, but you need to sell that rush of hormones, first love, folie à deux to carry the audience along with it – an area where Osman's band were experts, but one I'm not altogether convinced he's carried over here. Or then again, maybe it's just that I'm old now. Certainly it's not hard to wince at the doomed rescue of fighting cocks who, freed from their cages, simply turn on each other, a metaphor that isn't subtle but doesn't need to be: "They died down there in the dirt and piss and bones while all the time a huge, empty sky hung above them." And the appropriate heady note definitely catches once Shay, Nonesuch and their friends break away from the playhouse to set up their own alternative, the Ghost Theatre of the title – even if, when you stop to think about it, they seem basically to have invented immersive theatre early, complete with special effects by John Dee (who gets a splendid, unsavoury cameo).

There's plenty more to come after that - high society, fame and fortunes, plague, a provincial tour, unrest, and a very good bear. All building to a climax which is at once widescreen and downbeat. Not all of which worked for me, but none of which lacked for a strong sense of Osman being fully invested in it. It's an ungainly book in some ways, and certainly not always a successful one, yet I can't entirely hold that against it; certainly it makes a nice change to read something new and get the feel of a cult novel, as against a book which desperately wants to be a cult novel.

(Netgalley ARC)

Thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for an advance copy.

Not for me, this one. Didn't like the prose style, and found the plot a little convoluted, as well as the dialogue.

Arrgh, I think that is me done with any form of Historical Fiction.

A fantasy novel set in London was just too much of a draw for me to not give this a go. And I certainly gave it a good go, all the way through to the final glorious page (glorious in that there were no more pages to read).

I loved some aspects of the world we were presented with. And some of the characters had a lot of potential, but I just couldn’t get into a flow. That and the fact that I wasn’t enjoying the way the book was written, amounted to this ending up being a bit of a slog.

Thank You NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (UK & ANZ) for a review copy.

"The Ghost Theatre" by Mat Osman takes some getting into and if you put it down, it can be difficult to pick up the threads. However, it is worth persevering with - the beautiful friendship of Sparrow and the hawk she has trained, the quirky band of misfits that make up the Ghost Theatre and the theatrical descriptions are all things I enjoyed. The ending was slightly confusing for me so I will have to reread that part. I can imagine this being adapted for television and film.

The Ghost Theatre, Mat Osman’s second novel, is the story of two young people who meet on the rooftops of Elizabethan London. One of them is Shay, a teenage girl who dresses as a boy and belongs to a community of bird-worshippers. As the novel opens, Shay has released some caged birds from captivity in a shop and is being chased by the angry owner; with the instincts of a bird herself, she flees upwards to the roof and here she has her first encounter with Nonesuch. Taking his name from Henry VIII’s grand palace, Nonesuch claims to be the abducted son of a great lord, forced into performing at the Blackfriars Theatre, dressing as a woman to play leading female roles such as Cleopatra.

As Shay begins to fall in love with Nonesuch, she helps him to create the Ghost Theatre, a troupe of young actors who stage special plays in secret locations all over London. But it is another talent of Shay’s – her ability to tell fortunes – that brings her to the attention of Queen Elizabeth I and leads her into danger.

Mat Osman is the brother of the author and TV presenter Richard Osman and also the bassist in the British rock band Suede. I haven’t read his first novel, The Ruins, and had no idea what to expect from this one, but I can tell you it’s a very unusual book – not quite historical fiction and not quite fantasy either. It’s set in a city we can recognise as the London of the late Elizabethan period – there are outbreaks of plague, attempted rebellions, references to popular Elizabethan sports such as cock-fighting and bear-baiting – but there are also some imagined elements. As far as I know there was no community of Aviscultans living in Birdland and predicting the murmurations of starlings!

I have to be honest and say that this book wasn’t really for me. Perhaps because of the blend of alternate history with real history, it didn’t have the strong period feel I prefer – the dialogue was too modern, for example. I also found it quite difficult to focus on the plot; the imagery and descriptions were lovely but slightly distracting and sometimes I read several pages without really absorbing any of the words. If I had to compare this book to anything, it would be Megan Campisi’s The Sin Eater, another novel set in an alternate Elizabethan world and which I had some similar problems with. Incidentally, there is a sin eater in Osman’s novel too, although only mentioned in passing!

It would seem that Osman’s own love of music has influenced this story, with a lot of emphasis placed on the power of song, performing on stage and entertaining an audience. The novel as a whole is imaginative, creative, dreamlike and completely original. I wish I had been able to enjoy it more, but the right reader will love it.