The Quincunx
A Novel
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4.7 • 14 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An extraordinary modern novel in the Victorian tradition, Charles Palliser has created something extraordinary—a plot within a plot within a plot of family secrets, mysterious clues, low-born birth, high-reaching immorality, and, always, always the fog-enshrouded, enigmatic character of 19th century—London itself.
“So compulsively absorbing that reality disappears . . . One is swept along by those enduring emotions that defy modern art and a random universe: hunger for revenge, longing for justice and the fantasy secretly entertained by most people that the bad will be punished and the good rewarded.”—The New York Times
“A virtuoso achievement . . . It is an epic, a tour de force, a staggeringly complex and tantalizingly layered tale that will keep readers engrossed in days. . . . The Quincunx will not disappoint you. It is, quite simply, superb.”—Chicago Sun-Times
“A bold and vivid tale that invites the reader to get lost in the intoxicating rhythms of another world. And the invitation is irresistible.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“A remarkable book . . . In mood, color, atmosphere and characters, this is Charles Dickens reincarnated . . . It is an immersing experience.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“To read the first pages is to be trapped for seven-hundred odd more: you cannot stop turning them.”—The New Yorker
“Few books, at most a dozen or two in a lifetime, affect us this way. . . . For sheer intricacy and ingenuity, for skill and clarity of storytelling, it is the kind of book readers wait for, a book to get lost in.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The epic length of this first novel--nearly 800 densely typeset pages--should not put off readers, for its immediacy is equal to its heft. Palliser, an English professor in Scotland, where this strange yet magnetic work was first published, has modeled his extravagantly plotted narrative on 19th-century forms--Dickens's Bleak House is its most obvious antecedent--but its graceful writing and unerring sense of timing revivifies a kind of novel once avidly read and surely now to be again in demand. The protagonist, a young man naive enough to be blind to all clues about his own hidden history (and to the fact that his very existence is troubling to all manner of evildoers) narrates a story of uncommon beauty which not only brings readers face-to-face with dozens of piquantly drawn characters at all levels of 19th-century English society but re-creates with precision the tempestuous weather and gnarly landscape that has been a motif of the English novel since Wuthering Heights . The suspension of disbelief happens easily, as the reader is led through twisted family trees and plot lines. The quincunx of the title is a heraldic figure of five parts that appears at crucial points within the text (the number five recurs throughout the novel, which itself is divided into five parts, one for each of the family galaxies whose orbits the narrator is pulled into). Quintuple the length of the ordinary novel, this extraordinary tour de force also has five times the ordinary allotment of adventure, action and aplomb. Literary Guild dual main selection.
Customer Reviews
Truly Exceptional!
This is both the most rewarding and irritating novel I've possibly ever encountered. It is truly a gift to those who love to read, yet it is simultaneously the most depressing tale since Les Miserables. I found myself wanting to abandon the story several times primarily because of the gross naïveté of the main character, but was truly rewarded for going the distance. The story may be set in the long-ago, but it speaks volumes about modern life and the values we hold. Truly exceptional!