Sedition
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Motherless Alathea Sawneyford, her charms grown disturbing as she rebels against her father, has made the city's streets her own, while Annie Cantabile is constrained, by her own disfigurement and her father, to his pianoforte workshop under the shadow of Tyburn gibbet. One afternoon the dusty workshop receives a visitor. A man, representing an unscrupulous band of City speculators, Alathea's father among them, require a pianoforte and its charming teacher to find titled husbands for all their daughters: sisters Evelina and Marianne; stolid Harriet and pale, pining Georgiana. It seems an innocent enough plan but these are subversive times and perhaps even a drawing-room piano lesson isn't exactly what it seems. All of which will suit Alathea perfectly.
Fierce and bawdy, uproarious and exquisite, Sedition takes its plot at a racing gallop: bold, beautiful and captivating, it is a narrative masterpiece.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The first novel for adults from British YA author Grant is a witty, dark, and sophisticated tale set in 1790s London. Four men, wealthy but not well-bred, meet in a coffeehouse to discuss finding upper-class husbands for their five daughters. A concert on the still-new pianoforte, they decide, will display the girls perfectly to London's elite. Piano-maker Vittorio Cantabile soon delivers the expensive instrument, along with a French music teacher. The aptly named Monsieur Belladroit begins a program of instruction and seduction, but is surprised when one of his charges, Alathea Sawneyford, makes the first move. Alathea, whose sexual boldness has unhappy roots, finds an unexpectedly deep connection with Annie, Cantabile's hare-lipped daughter, like her, already an accomplished musician. Music provides the story's intrigues as well as its moments of joy, but even art's power to transcend human limits can't produce a happy ending. Grant eschews period clich s in favor of sharp, unsentimental storytelling that evokes the era with zest and authenticity. Her London, like her characters, is both flawed and fascinating. The novel's epigrammatic voice "London was never so lovely as when you were about to leave it" is another of its delights, detached in tone but delivering what are often dark ironies with memorable brevity and cleverness.
