Rustication
A vertiginous gothic masterpiece from the best-selling author of
The Quincunx.
Charles Palliser’s work has been hailed as “so compulsively
absorbing that reality disappears” (New York Times). Since his extraordinary
debut, The Quincunx, his works have sold over one million copies worldwide.
With his new novel, Rustication, he returns to the town of Thurchester, which
he evoked so hauntingly in The Unburied.
It is winter 1863, and Richard Shenstone, aged seventeen, has been
sent down—“rusticated”—from Cambridge under a cloud of suspicion. Addicted to
opium and tormented by sexual desire, he finds temporary refuge in a
dilapidated old mansion on the southern English coast inhabited by his newly
impoverished mother and his sister, Effie. Soon, graphic and threatening
letters begin to circulate among his neighbors, and Richard finds himself the
leading suspect in a series of crimes and misdemeanors ranging from vivisection
to murder.
Atmospheric, lurid, and
brilliantly executed, Rustication confirms Palliser’s reputation as “our
leading contemporary Victorian novelist” (Guardian).
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