“I had to create her out of nothing,” says JR Thorp of her debut novel Learwife, which explores the untold story of King Lear’s wife. The idea first occurred at the age of 11 when she read Agatha Christie’s The Moving Finger. “There’s a girl with a complicated relationship with her parents who says, ‘I wonder why Goneril and Regan were like that?'" She re-read the play and found only two brief references to Lear’s wife. Why this absence? More: https://canongate.co.uk/books/3650-learwi