The Fall - Penelope Curtis

The Fall traces three paths taken through one small village in Lincolnshire – by Isaac Newton, who received his first schooling there in the mid-17th century; by the Rev. Charles Hudson, who was vicar in the 1860s; and by the actor David Niven, who visited his mother-in-law there in the 1940s. Each is intent on his own preoccupations - on understanding the physical world, on conquering the Matterhorn, on conquering women - but there is a thread which binds them. An insignificant village becomes the unwitting centre of life-changing events and inevitable tragedy. Told from the margins - through the experience of a questioning child, and of wives and mothers who live as helpmeets to their men - The Fall is an act of vivid observation and reclamation.