Rustication: A Novel - Hardcover

Palliser, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393088723 ISBN 13: 9780393088724

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013

Synopsis

One of the Best Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly

“Endlessly fascinating…one of the strongest novels of the year. ” - School Library Journal
“Readers will have as much grisly fun just sorting out the facts as they will solving the mysteries.” -The Daily Beast
A vertiginous gothic masterpiece from the best-selling author of The Quincunx.

Charles Palliser’s work has been hailed as “so compulsively absorbing that reality disappears” (New York Times). Since his extraordinary debut, The Quincunx, his works have sold over one million copies worldwide. With his new novel, Rustication, he returns to the town of Thurchester, which he evoked so hauntingly in The Unburied.

It is winter 1863, and Richard Shenstone, aged seventeen, has been sent down―“rusticated”―from Cambridge under a cloud of suspicion. Addicted to opium and tormented by sexual desire, he finds temporary refuge in a dilapidated old mansion on the southern English coast inhabited by his newly impoverished mother and his sister, Effie. Soon, graphic and threatening letters begin to circulate among his neighbors, and Richard finds himself the leading suspect in a series of crimes and misdemeanors ranging from vivisection to murder.

Atmospheric, lurid, and brilliantly executed, Rustication confirms Palliser’s reputation as “our leading contemporary Victorian novelist” (Guardian).

About this title

About the Author

Charle Palliser was born in Massachusetts, but has lived in the UK since the age of three. A graduate of Oxford University, he writes full time in London.

Reviews

Something wicked this way comes, and this time it is in the heart of a small town in mid-Victorian England. Sent down from Cambridge in disgrace, 17-year-old Richard Shenstone retreats to an ancient, crumbling house on the edge of a marshy bay occupied by his recently widowed mother and his enigmatically secretive sister. As he records, a series of confusing and increasingly terrifying happenings in his journal, the reader is initially left to wonder how much of the story is real and how much of it is fueled by Richard’s opium-impaired imagination. Beginning with vicious rumors and lurid poison-pen letters and culminating in mayhem, mutilation, and murder, the escalating crimes ripple out, infecting an entire community of grotesques. Paranoia reigns supreme as the twists and turns keep multiplying in this gothic horror show adeptly spun by the author of The Quincunx. --Margaret Flanagan

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393088723
• ISBN 13: 9780393088724
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336