The Quick
A Novel
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4.3 • 9 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
An astonishing debut of epic scope and suspense, The Quick conjures up magic and menace in Victorian London's elegant drawing rooms and its dark, dangerous alleyways. A rich feast for lovers of the novels of Sarah Waters, The Night Circus, and The Crimson Petal and the White.
London, 1893: James Norbury is a shy would-be poet who takes up lodgings with a young man from the upper echelons of society and soon finds love where he least expected it. Just when it seems he is on the cusp of true happiness, James disappears.
His sister Charlotte, who lives quietly near the crumbling country estate where they grew up, is determined to find out what happened. Charlotte is horrified at what she discovers, but love spurs on her efforts to save her brother from an unthinkable fate. Her quest leads both to the mysterious, centuries-old Aegolius Club, and to a crowded, chaotic neighbourhood where she encounters unforgettable characters, including a female rope-walker turned vigilante and a former slum priest who share a heartbreaking secret, and a young American who chooses decency, or perhaps something more tender, over his own safety. With them, readers are caught up in the breathtaking climax to an ancient battle being fought within a secret world hiding in plain sight, in the middle of the great city of London itself.
As emotionally gripping as it is suspenseful, The Quick heralds Lauren Owen as a dazzling new literary talent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though currently enjoying a resurgence in popularity, vampires as we know them are a Victorian invention: Dracula came out in 1897. Debut author Owen sets her seductive book in 1892, in a late-Victorian London with a serious vampire problem. And like her Victorian counterparts, Owen depicts a host of characters: there's shy, provincial poet James Norbury and his intrepid sister Charlotte; vampire hunters Adeline Swift and Shadwell; a rich American in danger; and Augustus Mould, who researches vampire myth and fact on behalf of the vampires, and who's as warm and friendly as his name suggests. The vampire world is divided: the elite men of the Aegolius club coexist, not happily, with a ragged band of underclass undead. The book's pleasures include frequent viewpoint shifts that require readers to figure out how each character fits into the story, new riffs on vampire rituals and language, plus several love affairs, most of which are doomed. And there's plenty of action Mould's research, the clubmen's recruitment efforts, escalating battles between vampires and vampire hunters and among the vampires, and Charlotte's efforts to save James. Though the book has an old-fashioned, leisurely pace, which might cause some reader impatience, Owen's sentence-by-sentence prose is extraordinarily polished a noteworthy feat for a 500-page debut and she packs many surprises into her tale, making it a book for readers to lose themselves in.
