The act of reading ... begins on a flat surface, counter or page, and then gets stirred and chopped and blended until what we make, in the end, is a dish, or story, all our own.
— Adam Gopnik
— Adam Gopnik
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
November 12, 2016
Golden Hill
This was a romp, a pleasure in unexpected ways, and one of those books that I didn't think I'd be able to find and then happily did. On the surface, it's historical fiction, and a mystery: an affable young Englishman, Richard Smith, arrives in New York in 1746, with a letter of credit for an unheard of amount of money, and is greeted with suspicion by Mr. Lovell, the New York banker he calls upon. Smith agrees that he must wait sixty days for his story to be verified; in the meantime, he makes wary friends with Septimus Oakeshott and Henrik van Loon, two rising young men in the city, and becomes enamored and disgusted with Tabitha Lovell, the banker's unconventional prickly, difficult daughter, so there's also a romance. {There's also the small matter of escaping over the rooftops from a gang of thugs, threatened with hanging, and being challenged to a duel ... } There's an overhanging question of whether Smith is who he says he is, and hints that he is not, and the revelation that he has a secret purpose in coming to New York, and so hangs the plot.
I think I noted this book {whenever it was that I first heard about it :)} because of its setting and my growing enjoyment of historical fiction, but for me it's not about these or the unfolding story. On every page, in almost every sentence, the writing is so lush, so descriptive, so wordy, so quirky, that I found myself just reveling in it {and not minding overly much when the story flagged a little, as it sometimes did ...} It gave a real sense of what the colonial city would have been like, and gave us very well-drawn characters. I'm glad I found this book, and didn't pass it over as being not my usual thing.
Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford
Faber & Faber, 2016
Borrowed from the Boston Athenaeum
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Thank you for visiting!
Card Catalog
#6barsets
#emma200th
#maisie
#Middlemarchin2019
#PalliserParty
#Woolfalong
A.A. Milne
Agatha Christie
Alexander McCall Smith
Allison Pearson
Amy Lowell
Angela Thirkell
Ann Bridge
Anne Perry
Anthony Trollope
Anticipation
Armchair Travels
Art
Audiobooks
Barbara Pym
Biography
Bloomsbury
Bookish things
Boston
British Library Crime Classics
Cambridge
Cathleen Schine
Charles Dickens
Coffee-table books
Cookbooks
D.E. Stevenson
Deborah Crombie
Donna Leon
Dorothy L. Sayers
Dorothy Whipple
E.H. Young
E.M. Delafield
E.M. Forster
Edith Wharton
Elinor Lipman
Elizabeth Gaskell
Elizabeth Jenkins
Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth von Arnim
Ellizabeth Taylor
Emily Dickinson
Ernest Hemingway
Essays
Eudora Welty
Fanny Burney
Fiction
Films
Food from Books
Food Writing
Found on a Blog
George Eliot
Georgette Heyer
Gertrude Stein
Helen Ashton
Henry James
History
Homes and Haunts
Ideas
Imogen Robertson
Isabella Stewart Gardner
Jacqueline Winspear
Jane Austen
Joanna Trollope
Julia Child
Language
Laurie Colwin
Letters
Library Books
Literature
Louise Andrews Kent
Louise Penny
M.F.K. Fisher
Madame Bovary
Madame de Sévigné
Madame de Staël
Margaret Kennedy
Margery Sharp
Martha Grimes
Mary Shelley
Memoirs
Miss Read
My Year with Edith
Mysteries
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nonfiction
Nook
Only Connect
P.D. James
Paris in July
Persephones
Plays
Poetry
Pride and Prejudice 200
Queen Victoria
R.I.P.
Reading England 2015
Ruth Rendell
Sarah Orne Jewett
Short Stories
Susan Hill
Switzerland
Sylvia Beach
Team Middlemarch
The 1924 Club
The Brontës
the Carlyles
The Classics Club
Thomas Hardy
Virago
Virginia Woolf
Washington Irving
Willa Cather
William Maxwell
Winifred Peck
Winifred Watson
1 comment:
I've loved Spufford since The Child that Books Built. This book has just arrived and I'm really pleased to read how much you liked it. Maybe I'll begin reading it today.
Post a Comment