Bride of the Wilderness - Softcover

McCarry, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451159586 ISBN 13: 9780451159588

Publisher: Signet, 1989

Synopsis

Fanny’s father, Henry Harding, has known Oliver Barebones since the two men were children. Together they survived the Great Plague and the Great Fire, and now they are rich, middle-aged, and unmarried. Everyone’s shocked when Oliver, a lifelong bachelor, falls headfirst for a superstitious young girl named Rose. In two days he’s decided to marry her.

For the Hardings and the Barebones, it will be years before they find such happiness again. Ruin comes to them all in the shape of Alfred Montagu, a cold-hearted moneylender who ensnares them in crushing debt and schemes to marry Fanny. After her father dies, Fanny attempts to take refuge in France. It’s not far enough to escape her troubles, so with Oliver and Rose, she departs for a far-off place called Connecticut, dodging Montagu by diving into the teeth of dangers no London girl could ever imagine.

About this title

About the Author

Charles McCarry is the author of ten critically acclaimed novels and nine nonfiction books. He is a former editor-at-large of National Geographic and has contributed dozens of articles, short stories, and poems to leading national magazines. His op-ed pieces and other essays have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. For ten years he served under deep cover as a CIA operations officer.

From Publishers Weekly

Acclaimed for The Tears of Autumn, The Last Supper and other thrillers featuring master-spy Paul Christopher, McCarry now brings us a very different kind of novel set largely in early 18th century London and New England and featuring Christopher's ancestors. This is a remarkable narrative, written in McCarry's honed, imaginative style and packed with historical detail presented not as background but as lived experience. The central character is the enterprising Fanny, half-English, half-French, who, after various vicissitudes in London, accompanies her godfather, Oliver, when he goes to Connecticut to claim his inheritance. There she is abducted by Indians, taken to Canada and finally rescued by her French lover. The secondary characters, equally brimming with vigor and individuality, include savage Indians (scarcely more savage than the English and French for whom they fight); Oliver's beautiful, willful wife, who is in thrall to witchcraft; the Indianized daughter of an army captain; and a Puritan preacher-surgeon of surpassing toughness. Adroitly depicting passion, brutality, cultures in conflict and New World natural beauty, this novel is as engrossing as it is unusual.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Signet
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0451159586
• ISBN 13: 9780451159588
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 496