Make me thy lyre

‘An extraordinary, intriguing and wonderfully idiosyncratic work’
Nigel Bryant, translator of Raoul de Houdenc

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

‘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

I haven’t lost sleep reading a novel or memoir for a very long time, but turning off the bedside light was just not an option until I had got to the last of the adventures and reflections.The book made me wish either that I were five years older or that Flora had been five years younger, in which alternative universes our spells on the stages of the Oxford Playhouse and the Newman Rooms and in the mysterious gloom of that masonic lodge on Johnston Terrace might well have overlapped. And what a characteristically generous letter from Alan Howard, without whom I probably wouldn’t be working in Stratford now. Monica Kendall recaptures so beautifully the odd combination of utter freshness and occasional cynicism that always characterizes OUDS, the perpetual suspicion that some of one’s colleagues in the cast are calculating Machiavels who already know elders in real showbusiness and are only simulating friendship while enhancing their CVs, and its perpetual antidote in that youthful feeling that one can always postpone sleep until the vacation, especially during the summer term. It’s a wonderfully evocative read and I am sure it is just as compelling for readers who don’t know those streets and gardens and punts and green rooms; but in a different way.

Monica Kendall writes resonantly well. It is my second-favourite book about Oxford after Gaudy Night.
–– Michael Dobson, Director of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon; Professor of Shakespeare Studies, University of Birmingham