Overview

The Dress Lodger, a cunning historical thriller charged with a distinctly modern voice, is the book that launched Sheri Holman into bestsellerdom. With over 300,000 copies sold and a consistent top Reader's Circle performer for Ballantine, it was superbly reviewed, chosen as a New York Times Notable Book, and nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In Sunderland, England, a city quarantined by the cholera epidemic of 1831, Gustine, a defiant fifteen-year-old beauty in an elegant blue dress rented from her pimp-landlord, sells her body to feed her only love: a fragile baby boy. When she meets surgeon Henry Chiver, who has recently been implicated in the Burke and Hare killings, in which beggars were murdered so the corpses could be sold for medical research, Gustine begins working for him by securing cadavers for his ill-equipped anatomy school. It is a gruesome job that will soon threaten the very things she's working so hard to protect.

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9780802144928

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Reviews

REMARKABLE . . . A DAZZLING NARRATIVE THAT PULSES WITH IRONY, RIBALD HUMOR, AND HEARTBREAKING TRAGEDY. <br>--People (Book of the Week) <br> AN OUTSTANDINLY GENEROUS AND FERTILE IMAGINATION . . . Holman breathes life into the teeming streets of a distant world. . . . The destinies of the characters crisscross, . . . amplified by twists of fate and uncomfortable revelations. <br>--The New York Times Book Review <br> POTENT HISTORICAL FICTION . . . BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN . . . A rich read with a Dickensian kick and a moral to be told. <br>--USA Today <br> AS UNSETTLING AS IT IS BRILLIANT . . . Seamlessly crafted and deserving of wide readership. <br>--The Washington Post Book World <br>

Reminiscent of Wuthering Heights . . . or the novels of Dickens . . . With prose that's limber and vivid. -- The New York Times Book Review <br> Remarkable . . . A dazzling narrative that pulses with irony, ribald humor, and heartbreaking tragedy. -- People (Book of the Week) <br> Potent historical fiction . . . Beautifully written . . . A rich read with a Dickensian kick and a moral to be told. -- USA Today <br> As unsettling as it is brilliant . . . Seamlessly crafted and deserving of wide readership. -- The Washington Post Book World <br> Part medical thriller, part Greek tragedy, and wholly rewarding. -- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel <br> Holman seduces you. Her prose, tart, racy and somber, will sing in your soul a long while. --Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes <br> The Dress Lodger is as unsettling as it is brilliant. Holman attempts Herculean feats of plot and character, and the resulting novel is seamlessly crafted and deserving of wide acclaim and readership. -- The Washington Post Book World <br> The Dress Lodger not just a first-rate entertainment but a moving, enlightening one as well. -- The San Francisco Chronicle <br> If Clive Barker ever writes a historical novel, he'll be hard pressed to invent horrors more lurid than the rotting corpses and dangling viscera that grace, so to speak, this lurid and fascinating second novel from Holman. . . . An atmospheric tale that may have readers gasping for air. . . . Another stunner from a gifted and versatile new master of historical fiction. -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) <br> Brilliantly stark portrayal of 19th-century urban life, class warfare, cruel medicine and encroaching pestilence. . . . With remarkable breadth and depth, the narrative vividly portrays the human suffering spawned by the early Industrial Revolution. . . . Holman delivers a wealth of morbid, authentic detail, as well as an emotional pivot in her captivating Moll Flanders-like heroine. T

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