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…
Author Biography
Francis Spufford, a former Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year (1997), has
edited two acclaimed literary anthologies and a collection of essays about the
history of technology. His first book, I May Be Some Time, won the Writers'
Guild Award for Best Non-Fiction Book of 1996, the Banff Mountain Book Prize and
a Somerset Maugham Award. His second, The Child That Books Built, gave Neil
Gaiman ‘the peculiar feeling that there was now a book I didn't need to
write’. His third, Backroom Boys, was called ‘as nearly perfect as makes no
difference’ by the Daily Telegraph and was shortlisted for the Aventis Prize.
In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches
writing at Goldsmiths College and lives near Cambridge.
Shortlist, 2016 Costa First Novel Award