Golden Hill
'Best book of the century' Richard Osman
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- €11.99
Publisher Description
** Includes the first chapter of the hugely anticipated new novel by Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz. **
Winner of the Costa First Novel Award 2016
Winner of the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2017
Winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize 2017
Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2017
Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2017
Shortlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award 2017
Shortlisted for the British Book Awards Debut Novel of the Year 2017
A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 100 NOVEL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan Island, 1746. One rainy evening, a charming and handsome young stranger fresh off the boat from England pitches up to a counting house on Golden Hill Street, with a suspicious yet compelling proposition -- he has an order for a thousand pounds in his pocket that he wishes to cash. But can he be trusted? This is New York in its infancy, a place where a young man with a fast tongue can invent himself afresh, fall in love, and find a world of trouble . . .
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Francis Spufford’s first novel is alive with intelligence and devilry. It’s a glorious, grubby and extremely gratifying yarn that follows Richard Smith, a young man embarking on a new life in 1746 New York. Here he falls madly in love, gets tangled up in numerous scrapes with memorable ne’er-do-wells and inspirational characters and offers us an unflinching window into an America edging towards revolution. We promise you’ll have a wonderful time losing yourself in Spufford’s majestic prose.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spufford's first novel is set in colonial New York City, where as new arrival from London Richard Smith discovers things can get out of hand quickly, and often do. As soon as his ship docks on Allhallows 1746, Smith heads to merchant Gregory Lovell's Golden Hill home to cash a large bill of credit. Despite Smith's refusal to divulge exactly who he is or how he intends to use the money, Lovell gives him a variety of currency and coin and introduces the young man to his daughters, lovely Flora and sharp-tongued Tabitha. For two months rumors fly, as Smith exchanges flirtatious jibes with Tabitha, cautiously converses with the slave Zephyra, drinks coffee with the governor's secretary, is rescued from a Guy Fawkes Day brawl by the secretary and the slave Achilles, dines with the governor, plays whist with the chief justice, languishes in debtor's prison, performs in a stage play, gets caught trysting with the play's full-figured star, fights a duel, and stands trial for murder. On Christmas Day, Smith finally reveals his high-minded purpose for coming to America. Recounting this picaresque tale with serious undertones, Spufford adeptly captures 18th-century commercial practices and linguistic peculiarities as well as pre-Revolutionary Manhattan's cultural hodgepodge. His New York bursts with energy, danger, and potential. His ironic, sometimes bawdy sense of humor and coy storytelling may frustrate those who do not "cotton" to the "cant," but patient readers are rewarded with a feast of language, character, local color, and historical detail.
Customer Reviews
Damme, ‘tis a Botch.
All the very worst and laziest tendencies of modern ‘literary’ fiction, including but not limited to shallowness, glibness, pleonasm and a tendency to over-describe in an attempt to compensate for a lack of properly considered and realised situations and characters, swarm through this awful book. The clearly extensive historical research oozes clunkily from almost every page. The author (who in my opinion is not a writer) has obviously imbibed his Smollett, Fielding, Richardson et al with ardour but instead of synthesising that and all his other clearly fulsome reading with his own properly-considered ideas and creating something interesting and authentic, he’s made this flashy, phoney collection of ugly furbelows and geegaws, a mare’s nest of simple-minded stylistic flourishes nailed onto a flimsy premiss. The dialogue was so atrocious that I was a little embarrassed for Mr Spufford. I could have written this myself and that’s not a compliment, as I have no personal voice & no literary ability either. Dire.