Looking left and right, blinking against an icy wind, you realise you have entered an unknown street of unlit houses full of unknown people.Īnd yet you did not choose me blindly. Now that you’re actually here, the air is bitterly cold, and you find yourself being led along in complete darkness, stumbling on uneven ground, recognising nothing. When I first caught your eye and you decided to come with me, you were probably thinking you would simply arrive and make yourself at home. The truth is that you are an alien from another time and place altogether. You may imagine, from other stories you’ve read, that you know it well, but those stories flattered you, welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged. This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have not been here before. Keep your wits about you you will need them. It's hopeless to resist" ( Entertainment Weekly). "Cocky and brilliant, amused and angry, is rightfully earning comparisons to observer extraordinaire Charles Dickens. Twenty years in its conception, research, and writing, The Crimson Petal and the White is teeming with life, rich in texture and incident, with breathtakingly real characters. Infatuated with Sugar, William’s patronage brings her into the circles of his family and milieu: his wife who barely overcomes chronic hysteria to make her appearances during “the Season” his mysteriously hidden-away daughter, left to the care of minions his pious brother, foiled in his devotional calling by his lust for the Widow Fox as well as preening socialites, drunken journalists, untrustworthy servants, vile guttersnipes, and whores of all stripes and persuasions. Her ascent through the strata of Victorian society begins with the egotistical perfume magnate William Rackham. Sugar, a nineteen-year-old whore in the brothel of the terrifying Mrs. At the heart of this panoramic narrative is a young woman’s struggle to lift her body and soul out of the gutter. A teenage prostitute ascends through the many layers of Victorian London society in this highly acclaimed “big, sexy, bravura a novel” (Janet Maslin, The New York Times).
0 kommentar(er)
