‘An extraordinary, intriguing and wonderfully idiosyncratic work’

Flora spotted a large handwritten sign perched against a shrub with two long arrows. Above the left arrow was written ‘BRIDGE’, above the other arrow was, in smaller capital letters, ‘ABSOLUTELY NOTHING’.

Set largely in 1970s Oxford and USA, Make me thy lyre is a Bildungsroman with humour, Shakespeare, art, poetry, death and loss. It is framed by a prologue and epilogue set fifty years later. Flora is an only child from suburban north London. At Oxford University she reads Arabic and plays Rosaline and Beatrice. Initially lonely, she discovers boys and friendship, but tragedy strikes. A bridge connects us to the living; can it connect us to the dead? The past matters.


‘There are so many things I love about this. The energy and drive and passion, and the vivid recreation and recording of a past so deeply meaningful to Flora. What do I especially love? The way Monica Kendall has woven Shakespeare into the fabric of so many moments and epiphanies/realisations – my god, he really was a genius, wasn't he?’ –– Nigel Bryant, translator of Raoul de Houdenc