Changes

|summary=This novel is an imaginative, impressive, skilful début. Burton is a powerful and sensitive writer. Each character lives through her pages and lingers in the reader's mind after the close. She spins her words like sugar, revelling in the craft of storytelling. Realistic historical detail is effortlessly mixed with fictional artistry as the reader’s senses are bombarded with the sweetness and sourness of the private and public Seventeenth Century lives of affluent, hypocritical, obsessive and insecure Amsterdammers celebrating a ‘Golden Age’ but caught between Guilders and God, desire and morality.

}}

''The Miniaturist'' is a meticulously researched wonder of a book. Burton, her imagination fired by a trip to the Rijksmuseum, where she viewed the wealthy Amsterdammer merchant’s wife Petronella Oortman’s elaborate 1686 cabinet dolls' house, revels in creating her fictional world. She imbues it with authentic details including descriptions of actual rooms, pieces of commissioned art, a parrot’s cage, food made from wax, furniture made to exact scale and miniature puppets. She is a word smith, painting a rich canvas of imagery and emotions for the reader. Her ‘Nella’ Oortman is a tentative rural bride of 18 embarking on a union with an older, learned man of languages who has a warehouse full of strange curiosities.