WITH Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History on our doorstep, Tracy Chevalier’s latest novel could prove very popular with the city’s book fans.

Last year was the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth, which might also inspire readers to pick up the story which focuses on fossils.

Ms Chevalier got the idea for her latest historical bestseller, Remarkable Creatures, when she visited a small dinosaur museum in Dorchester on the South Coast with her son.

Among the displays, there was a wall devoted to Mary Anning, who lived in the early 19th century in the nearby town of Lyme Regis, where there are plenty of fossils.

Aged 12, she uncovered the first complete specimen of an Ichthyosaurus, a marine reptile about 200 million years old.

Mary Anning was struck by lightning when she was a baby and the writer says she felt her own jolt of lightning when she heard the story and knew she had to investigate further.

In the novel, from the moment she’s struck by lightning, it is clear that Mary Anning is marked for greatness.

On the windswept, fossil-strewn beaches of the English coast, she learns that she can find what no one else can see.

When Mary uncovers an unusual fossilised skeleton in the cliffs near her home, she sets the religious fathers on edge, the townspeople to vicious gossip, and the scientific world alight.

In an arena dominated by men, however, Mary is barred from the academic community, and as a young woman with unusual interests she is suspected of “sinful” behaviour.

Nature is a threat, throwing bitter, cold storms and landslips at her. And when she falls in love, it is with an impossible suitor.

Luckily, Mary finds an unlikely champion in Elizabeth Philpot, a recent exile from London, who also loves scouring the beaches.

Their relationship strikes a delicate balance between fierce loyalty, mutual appreciation, and barely suppressed envy.

In their struggle to be recognised in the wider world, Mary and Elizabeth eventually take comfort in their friendship.

When I picked up this novel, I thought there was a danger that Chevalier would get too bogged down in the historical detail, but she makes Mary a rounded character at the centre of an inspiring story and I will now seek out the author’s other novels, which include Girl With a Pearl Earring, inspired by Johannes Vermeer’s painting, and later dramatised in film starring Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson.

The writer has also signed a film option deal for Remarkable Creatures and I hope the story eventually hits the big screen.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR TRACY Chevalier was born and grew up in Washington DC, US.

After getting a degree in English from Oberlin College in Ohio, the author moved to London in 1984. She intended to stay six months and is still here.

She says on her website: “As a kid I’d often said I wanted to be a writer because I loved books and wanted to be associated with them.

“I wrote the odd story in high school, but it was only in my 20s that I started writing ‘real’ stories.

“Sometimes I wrote a story in a couple evenings; other times it took me a whole year to complete one.

“Once I took a night class in creative writing, and a story I’d written for it was published in a London-based magazine called Fiction. I was thrilled, even though the magazine folded four months later.

“I worked as a reference book editor for several years until 1993 when I left my job and did an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia.

“My tutors were the English novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Rose Tremain.

“For the first time in my life I was expected to write every day, and I found I liked it. I also finally had an idea I considered ‘big’ enough to fill a novel.

“I began The Virgin Blue during that year, and continued it after the course, juggling writing with freelance editing.

“An agent is essential to getting published. I found my agent Jonny Geller through dumb luck and good timing.

“A friend from the MA course had just signed on with him and I sent my manuscript of The Virgin Blue mentioning my friend’s name. Jonny was just starting as an agent and needed me as much as I needed him.

“Since then he’s become a highly respected agent in the UK and I’ve gone along for the ride.”