Will Starling
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Finalist, Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic
Longlisted, IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
From the acclaimed author of Daniel O'Thunder comes a rollicking, bawdy, and haunting novel about love and redemption, death and resurrection.
The great metropolis of London swaggers with Regency abandon as nineteen-year-old Will Starling returns from the Napoleonic Wars having spent five years assisting a military surgeon. Charming, brash, and damaged, Will is helping his mentor build a medical practice — and a life — in the rough Cripplegate area. To do so requires an alliance with the Doomsday Men: body snatchers that supply surgeons and anatomists with human cadavers.
After a grave robbing goes terribly awry and a prostitute is accused of murder, Will becomes convinced of an unholy conspiracy that traces its way back to Dionysus Atherton, the brightest of London's rising surgical stars. Wild rumours begin to spread of experiments upon the living and of uncanny sightings in London's dark streets.
Will's obsessive search for the truth twists through alleyways, brothels, and charnel houses, towards a shattering discovery — about Dionysus Atherton and about Will, himself.
Steeped in scientific lore, laced with dark humour, Will Starling is historical fiction like none other.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"What is this world's true calling, after all, save the driving of its denizens mad?" Such is the tenor of 19th-century London when filtered through Weir's magnificent new novel. (Daniel O'Thunder was shortlisted for multiple awards, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for First Book). An exuberant yarn related by young Will himself "Your Wery Umble Narrator" it is a sumptuous Frankensteinian potboiler of knockabout slang, scientific lore, rollicking personalities and atmosphere thick as fog. After the Napoleonic Wars, Will finds himself working as a surgeon's assistant in London's grungy Cripplegate district, where "sunlight itself is sullied." As intelligent as he is inquisitive, Will becomes well acquainted with unsavory elements of medicine, especially the grave robbers who keep the College of Surgeons in cadavers. He also learns of orphans disappearing; of corpses refusing death; and of Dionysus Atherton, a charismatic surgeon who, Will believes, is intrinsically linked to the city's evils. Weir's gift with idiom is without peer; as his narrative gambols about, the deft wordplay breathes grimy life into a wretched London. While its themes of death, scientific perversion, classism and poverty may be dark as pitch, Weir's style and wit ensures the novel remains a boisterous, subversive romp.
