The winners of the 2014 B&N Discover Awards have been announced! Evie Wyld’s gripping novel All the Birds, Singing, and Bryce Andrew’s ranching memoir Badluck Way have won in the fiction and nonfiction categories, respectively.
5
1
eBook
$11.49
$14.99
Save 23%
Current price is $11.49, Original price is $14.99. You Save 23%.
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
WANT A NOOK?
Explore Now
Related collections and offers
LEND ME®
See Details
11.49
In Stock
Overview
A New York Times Notable Book from the author of A Stolen Tongue: A tale of crime and survival in nineteenth-century England “as unsettling as it is brilliant” (The Washington Post Book World).
In Sunderland, England, a city quarantined by the cholera epidemic of 1831, a defiant, fifteen-year-old beauty in an elegant blue dress sells her body to feed her only love: a fragile baby boy. When the surgeon Henry Chiver offers Gustine a different kind of work, she hopes to finally change her terrible circumstances.
But Chiver was recently implicated in the famous case of Burke and Hare, who murdered beggars and sold their corpses for medical research. And soon, Gustine’s own efforts to secure cadavers for Chiver’s anatomy school will threaten the very things she’s working so hard to protect . . .
“Reminiscent of Wuthering Heights . . . or the novels of Dickens . . . An even better book than Holman’s first, with prose that’s more limber and vivid—and with, appropriately, even more heart.” —The New York Times Book Review
“As unsettling as it is brilliant. Holman attempts Herculean feats of plot and character, and the resulting novel is seamlessly crafted.” —The Washington Post Book World
“Holman seduces you. Her prose, tart, racy and somber, will sing in your soul a long while.” —Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes
“Holman’s style is risky and direct . . . with unflinching emotional precision. This dazzlingly researched epic is an uncommon read.” —Publisher Weekly, starred review
In Sunderland, England, a city quarantined by the cholera epidemic of 1831, a defiant, fifteen-year-old beauty in an elegant blue dress sells her body to feed her only love: a fragile baby boy. When the surgeon Henry Chiver offers Gustine a different kind of work, she hopes to finally change her terrible circumstances.
But Chiver was recently implicated in the famous case of Burke and Hare, who murdered beggars and sold their corpses for medical research. And soon, Gustine’s own efforts to secure cadavers for Chiver’s anatomy school will threaten the very things she’s working so hard to protect . . .
“Reminiscent of Wuthering Heights . . . or the novels of Dickens . . . An even better book than Holman’s first, with prose that’s more limber and vivid—and with, appropriately, even more heart.” —The New York Times Book Review
“As unsettling as it is brilliant. Holman attempts Herculean feats of plot and character, and the resulting novel is seamlessly crafted.” —The Washington Post Book World
“Holman seduces you. Her prose, tart, racy and somber, will sing in your soul a long while.” —Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes
“Holman’s style is risky and direct . . . with unflinching emotional precision. This dazzlingly researched epic is an uncommon read.” —Publisher Weekly, starred review
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555847661 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 182,241 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Sheri Holman grew up in rural Virginia and now lives with her husband and three children in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of The Dress Lodger, a national bestseller nominated for an IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and The Mammoth Cheese.
Hometown:
Brooklyn, New YorkDate of Birth:
June 1, 1966Place of Birth:
Richmond, VirginiaEducation:
B.A. in Theatre from the College of William and Mary, 1988Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
I A GIRL AND HER SHADOW
The boys down on the Low Quay know a hundred ways to sell bad fish.
They'll mingle four dead eels with every one alive knowing full well the average man can't tell which is which tangled inside a cloudy tub. They'll polish up a stinking mackerel with a bit of turpentine and buff it with their shirttails until it gleams. Beneath the wharves late in the day, you can catch them blowing air into the bellies of cod to make their under-weight catch look fat and succulent. Poor hungry family, to puncture those flatulent fish and find them more air than meat. But a boy's got to make a living, and when he is forced to feel around in the mud at low tide, scrambling after sprats dropped overboard from a trawler, he may have to take a little advantage to earn his daily wage.
You notice it most on Saturday nights when the markets are set up along Low Street. The orange sellers have secretly boiled their fruit to plump it up, though the practice causes it to turn black within a day; the cherry vendors have weighted their prepacked boxes with cabbage leaves to tip the scales. Not everyone is dishonest, but nearly every merchant prefers to sell his wares after dark when their imperfections are softened by candlelight and men's eyes are less discerning after a full day's work. Most workers are paid on Saturday night here in Sunderland, so they have money in their pockets for meat pies and jacket potatoes kept warm in barrel ovens; they buy two pennies' worth of greasy herring and a roll to go with it. The young sons of public house owners crisscross the market delivering trays of ale to wives who've ordered it for their family dinners, and are stopped along the way by so many thirsty men, they have to run back for more. On Saturday night, when the streets are extravagant with stacked purple cabbages, ruby apples, bright green leeks fringing stalls iridescent with oyster shells, everyone feels rich. There will be meat on Sunday, and when a favorite customer comes to buy his chops the expansive butcher holds out a newly slaughtered pig's heart like a present.
It is Saturday night; work is another two days away. Sunday, you may play cards or walk out on the town moor or, if you are feeling guilty about something, wash your face and go to church. Perhaps you'll just want to sleep, which is what happens most Sundays, when you take your tea on the stool by the fire and realize how good it feels just to sit and stare until your head drops down upon your chest and your cup slips from your fingers. But Saturday night you are alive and want some entertainment. Two new shows have come to town. One is about that disease everyone keeps talking about, the cholera morbus, but the second one sounds far more promising. The Spectacle Unique Les Chats Savants: Signior Capelli's celebrated menagery of Sagacious Cats, well known in the principal cities of Europe, Whose Docility and Intelligence Never Fail to Astonish. You could certainly stand to be delightfully astonished, since the astonishment you'll receive tomorrow when you learn half the plums you bought tonight are rotted through will be decidedly less pleasant. You push your way between the stalls along Low Street headed toward the theatre on Sans. On your right, the River Wear makes a snaking black ribbon between Sunderland proper and well-lit Monkwearmouth on the opposite shore. There are fewer ships on the river because of the Quarantine, you think, and it is killing everyone, from the keelmen who load Newcastle coal to the potteries that need imported Dorset clay. Your back room matchstick factory is safe, at least, no matter what happens. For ten years you've painted phosphorus tips on little wooden splinters and you've never, for a day, done without supplies. The phosphorus is slowly rotting your jawbone and turning you into a freakish mess, you can't bear to look in the glass, but tonight, Saturday night, you want only to see some sagacious cats, and not think about how your hands and face glow in the dark.
Outside the cheap theatre, where children and domestics get in half price — as if life weren't easy enough for them anyway — you come upon a stampede. Housemaids leap squealing into coachmen; little boys stomp, stomp, stomp like Indians in a rain dance. It's those damn frogs. They've come up from the riverbed, where they've been fucking and spawning, fucking and spawning all this wet, warm autumn until they've overflowed the steep banks and invaded the town. Merchants along Low Street have found moist green frogs suffocated in their flour, the pastor of Trinity Church found them floating in the Communion wine. Just last night, your landlord cursed the chorus of frogs yowling in his basement and sent down his ferret to rip through them. Now it seems the frogs are headed toward the nicer part of town. They are advancing on Bishopwearmouth, the third and by far the most affluent section of Sunderland, built on higher ground to the south. Good, you think. Let a little of the river bottom come up in the world. Let a lawyer or two lie awake and worry, like you have on too many nights, that the Lord has sent a modern plague of Egypt to destroy this town.
How those dainty domestics and little children carry on, jabbing their umbrellas at flailing rubbery legs, frightening the frogs far more than they themselves are frightened! You roll your eyes and dig into your pocket for the 5 d. they extort from you at the box office, reach across to hand the rouged ticket vendor your money — but if you please, wait just a moment....
Before you duck inside, dear matchstick painter, and disappear from view for what will be at least two hours, we beg leave to ask what might at first seem a frivolous question, but which will eventually make sense: if you were to compose your own story — forgetting for a moment the small fact that you cannot exactly write — would you choose this Saturday night, outside of this cheap theatre, through this veil of frogs in which to introduce your heroine? If you might have at your command the entire globe, any moment of historic confluence, if you might in the writing of a humble book bring back to life a Queen of Sheba or an Empress Josephine, would you strew her path with frogs here in dirty Sunderland when you might pluck from your imagination green emeralds to scatter before her in Zanzibar? No, we thought not. You are a personage of refined taste. Left up to you, who is to say this book might not evolve into a tender tale of a match-stick painter whose matches so delight the King of Sicily that he dedicates his palace to her private use, festoons it with pearls and causes the British royal family to hold her quartz and lapis phosphorus pots? If the story were in your hands, we might expect no unpleasantness, no murder or blackest betrayal, for you are not of a punishing nature. And yet, dear matchstick painter, your growing suspicions are correct — this is not your story. This is ours, and you have been summoned, led through the marketplace, encouraged to see this entertainment over the tedious play on cholera morbus down the street for solely that purpose: to provide us with an introduction to our true heroine, who, if you'll turn around, is walking down Sans Street toward you, carefully picking her way across the unctuous carpet of frogs.
Don't be upset, dear friend; we can't all of us be heroes. Though we met you first, we shouldn't feel compelled to follow your tiresome life. From the factory. Home. To the public house for a warm beer every third night — the whole process repeating itself ad nauseam. You have a purpose in the machinery of this book, and though it is not large, it is necessary. We have brought you here to describe her to us, we being too far away in time and space to form a clear impression. Please, dear friend, keep us in suspense no longer. Is she lovely? Plain? Young? Old? First impressions are difficult to shake, dear friend, so please, be precise.
Begin with her face.
It is thin, you say, but well formed? Has she not the snub nose and round cheeks of so many Sunderland girls whose raw ancestors tramped down from Scotland or washed ashore lo those many centuries ago from pork-fed Saxony? Oh, hers is a more Gaulish beauty — if you dare to use the term as a compliment barely fifteen years after Waterloo — with delicate arching brows, a reasonably straight nose, and large, dark, almost navy blue eyes. Her slightly sunken cheeks are drizzled with light freckles — hereditary, you would wager, for surely freckles coaxed out by a pleasant day at the shore would not sit so starkly against white skin. And she is very pale. Her face and exposed arms are the color of cooling milk, faintly blue in the bucket; they possess the sort of pallor that scatters light, the sort of luminescence that great ladies, it is rumored, take small tastes of arsenic to achieve. Hers is the skin of a girl who never sees the light of day.
And her hair, what of her hair? Such skin must set off a deep brunette mane or a fiery halo of red. No, you say? She is blonde? With hair almost as pale as her skin, worn in a complicated style (known in fashionable circles as an "apollo"); her tresses braided and wrapped into a topknot at the crown, while little blonde ringlets are left to frizz at her temples. An ornament which if decorating the tresses of a lady would be a gilt arrow to honor the slayer of Python but on our heroine is a pigeon-feather-dyed red, bisects the knot and completes the apollo.
But we are confused. Is our heroine not a lady? Are we to go through this novel in the company of some commonplace Sunderland slut — not invited to any fancy parties, fed on boiled potatoes and beer when we might, in some other novel, have prawns and champagne? You said she has the pallor of a lady, wears her hair after the fashion of the day. How is she dressed, pray tell? By her clothes, surely we will know her.
Her dress is blue. How descriptive. But of what color blue?
Yes, of course in better years we too attended spectacles where nymphs and water sprites yearned for mortal men, where mermaids brushed their hair and admired themselves in flashing mirrors. You would have us picture, then, the backdrop of that theatrical Sea: the billows of cyan silk, the azure pasteboard waves, the ultramarine netting, tangled with sea horses and starfishes, flung to represent an aquatic paradise. We will close our eyes and do as you command. Ah, how cool they look while we sweat in the theatre of a hot summer's night, spying on their underwater world with its hierarchy and despot king and chorus of rebellious daughters; a world so rich and foreign, yet so happily fraught with the politics of our own. Now, to that cool, blinding blue, we are to add the color of our play's artificial sky, appreciating the scene painter's ability to reach back into his childhood and extract the extinct shade of cerulean that floated over the River Wear before the factories were built. Yes, we are old enough to remember that color. We are old enough, certainly, to remember a good many other things besides.
To the complex blue body of her dress, you would have us add wide-blown gigot sleeves swelling from bare shoulders and a matching belt cinched at her narrow waist, creating the inverted-triangle look so popular among fashionable women of today. Festoon the entirety with tulle and white bouffant in three puffy tiers from knee to ankle-length hem. Tie her up with a handful of bows down the bodice. She is a sumptuous, fantastical wedding cake. A walking confection. A tasty morsel. And yet, still you hesitate. Certainly no one other than the finest lady might afford such a singular dress. So what is wrong?
She seems small.
Is that all? Dainty is the fashion, my friend. Long gone is the tall, lithe, neo-Grecian look made popular by Boney and his Court in France. Give us the fantasy of the Romantics, frothy faux shepherdess frocks and Oriental accessories! We are a global power, and yet we are pastoral! We have fought in Egypt, we are marching across India; we have the technology to replicate the entire world in our clothing, and we yearn for a simpler time. Anyone would look small against such an empire. But stop, you say. If we are to tap you for a description of our heroine, we must trust your evaluation. Daintiness is bred and daintiness is manufactured. This girl — for surely she can be no more than sixteen — has had daintiness thrust upon her. She seems to you stunted and underdeveloped beneath that dress; her shoulders are painfully thin and her belt hangs loosely at the waist. Her shoes, the universal giveaway of poverty, peek out from under the skirt, revealing themselves as mud-spattered, worn-heeled work boots.
Is it possible? Could we be mistaken in our choice of heroines? Perhaps we got the date wrong, or the address, or even the century. Is there no one behind her — one of her betters perhaps, coming to rescue our book from certain dullness? Look again, dear friend, leave the ticket booth and just peer around the corner to make sure we have not overlooked someone.
Why do you draw back? What? What is it there in the shadows you see?
Now you are rushing back to the theatre. Now you claim your duty is done? We have given you the opportunity to participate in our story, and you choose instead to hide yourself among the mass of anonymous theatregoers eating sandwiches from dirty handkerchiefs, pulling the corks from bottles of beer with their round yellow teeth. What is her name at least? Ask her name! But now the lights are come up, the first disoriented snow leopard bounds on stage decked in an alchemist's cape and black cone hat; and you, dear matchstick painter, for we can see you hesitating in the aisle, are wrestling with yourself. It is Saturday night. You only wanted to see some chats savants, you wanted nothing to do with this infernal business. But you knew her, didn't you? We could tell from your stricken face when you peered into the shadows, you recognized that girl. What is her name?
A lioness teeters on her back paws wearing a mortarboard. A gray tabby, mangy and naked, runs figure eights through her unsteady legs, and the crowd roars.
Gustine. Her name is Gustine.
Thank you, kind matchstick painter. We have a certain sight, you know, but the fact is, we don't always trust it for details. It's a strange ability we have that allows us to see more clearly those who are closer to us, who perhaps are only a few weeks or a few months separated in time. Like for instance you. Or the turnip-fleshed woman who is trailing our heroine. The one you pulled back from in the dark. Her we see quite clearly, though perhaps she appeared to you as only a malevolent shadow along the ground.
In front of us, Gustine and her shadow turn left onto High Street.
A greasy drizzle has picked up, slicking cobblestones already slippery with fallen oak leaves. She heads away from the theatre toward dark linen and woolen shops, bakeries, booksellers and stationers shut up tight against the raw night. Hackney cabs clatter by, not pausing to see why a respectably dressed woman might be walking alone in a closed neighborhood without a cloak or umbrella at half past nine at night. A few merchants, reluctant to go home and face another night of boiled onions and Bible lessons, linger over their locks, peering into their dark windows as though sure of having forgotten something very important. They catch a glimpse of her, reflected by gaslight in their plate glass, and stay just a little longer, to watch and wish that one night, they might be coming out at exactly the moment she passes by, and might, by accident, brush against her tight hot snatch. Gustine lifts her skirt and shakes a frog loose from the hem.
People are saying this explosion of river frogs is due to an atmospheric disturbance, the same that brought the lightning storms and unseasonably warm weather even through October. They say that cholera is certain to follow in its wake. Gustine looks up to where the atmosphere is supposed to be. She wonders if one night it will merely begin to rain cholera. She wonders if cholera could even make it through the heavy gray clouds on this moonless sky begot by Sunderland's hardworking chimneys.
Behind Gustine her shadow pauses, and it too cocks an eye at the sky.
"Damn it!" Gustine turns and yells at the creature behind her. "Will you please just sod off?"
The girl gathers her dress and sprints away down High Street. She takes a right and then a left and then another right, trying her best to shake the old woman who follows her every night. The old bitch who dogs her every bloody step. Truly, business is bad enough with the Quarantine. The last thing she needs is that hag on her tail.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Dress Lodger"
by .
Copyright © 2000 Sheri Holman.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
What People are Saying About This
Frank McCourt
Holman seduces you. Her prose, tart, racy and somber, will sing in your soul a long while.
Reading Group Guide
1. Why do you think the novel opens by following Fos? How do you feel when you encounter her again later in Whilky's house? What does the movement with, then away, and finally back to Fos accomplish?
2. Describe the voice of the narrator in The Dress Lodger. How is the narrative voice different from that of most contemporary novels? Does the voice remind you of other books you may have read? Does the narrator play a role in the story? How do you, as a reader, react when the narrator addresses you directly?
3. How would you characterize Henry's feelings for Gustine? Is his behavior toward her reprehensible, or do the class-based restrictions imposed upon him thwart his good intentions? What are his intentions? Does he even know? Compare Henry's interactions with Gustine to his behavior with Audrey.
4. Compare the clearly articulated goals of the various characters: Gustine, the Eye, Pink, Henry, Audrey. What is each character striving for? What do you think about their goals? How do their efforts to do good and to be of use to others backfire, and are these characters responsible for their failure to realize their goals?
5. How would you characterize the relationship between Whilky and Gustine? Is she Whilky's slave or does she have other options? Is being a prostitute ever a moral issue for her, or even in the world of The Dress Lodger? Is Whilky evil for exploiting Gustine, or is he also a victim of the economic circumstances in Sunderland?
6. What do you think the social function might be of a play like Cholera Morbus, or Love and Fright? Why would people wish to see such a play? What did you think of the content of the play and of theaudience's reaction?
7. Discuss the gulf between rich and poor in this novel. What are some of the more significant flash points of this divide? What do you think of Whilky's suspicion of the government and of doctors, and the general belief among the poor that the cholera epidemic is some kind of conspiracy? Are the wealthier characters also victimized or in some way injured by this social chasm?
8. Is there a metaphorical significance to Gustine's baby's condition? What do you make of his namelessness and his disease (and Henry's particular interest in it)? Do you think Gustine is attached to her child in ways she would not be if the child had been born perfectly healthy?
9. What function does the Student of Life have in this novel? What does his presence tell the reader about narrative? Is his goal of writing a book "spanning the great gulf that yawns between rich and poor" laughable or laudable?
10. What is the connection between prostitution and anatomy? Is Holman drawing an analogy? Does labor, in the general sense, form the third point of a triangle in this novel? In what ways is The Dress Lodger concerned with the economic uses to which the body is put?
11. What function does the Labor in Vain serve in The Dress Lodger? How does this space in which characters of various social classes congregate, work within the fabric of the novel? How does the name of the public house relate to some of the events of the story? Do the people in this novel labor in vain, and if so, is the pointlessness of their labor inevitable?
12. Henry says that he has "been wed to the graveyard since I first laid eyes on Dr. Knox." Is Henry in some way addicted to dissection? Would such an addiction explain his dubious actions in Edinburgh?
Foreword
1. Why do you think the novel opens by following Fos? How do you feel when you encounter her again later in Whilky's house? What does the movement with, then away, and finally back to Fos accomplish?
2. Describe the voice of the narrator in The Dress Lodger. How is the narrative voice different from that of most contemporary novels? Does the voice remind you of other books you may have read? Does the narrator play a role in the story? How do you, as a reader, react when the narrator addresses you directly?
3. How would you characterize Henry's feelings for Gustine? Is his behavior toward her reprehensible, or do the class-based restrictions imposed upon him thwart his good intentions? What are his intentions? Does he even know? Compare Henry's interactions with Gustine to his behavior with Audrey.
4. Compare the clearly articulated goals of the various characters: Gustine, the Eye, Pink, Henry, Audrey. What is each character striving for? What do you think about their goals? How do their efforts to do good and to be of use to others backfire, and are these characters responsible for their failure to realize their goals?
5. How would you characterize the relationship between Whilky and Gustine? Is she Whilky's slave or does she have other options? Is being a prostitute ever a moral issue for her, or even in the world of The Dress Lodger? Is Whilky evil for exploiting Gustine, or is he also a victim of the economic circumstances in Sunderland?
6. What do you think the social function might be of a play like Cholera Morbus, or Love and Fright? Why would people wish to see such a play? What did you think of the content of the play and ofthe audience's reaction?
7. Discuss the gulf between rich and poor in this novel. What are some of the more significant flash points of this divide? What do you think of Whilky's suspicion of the government and of doctors, and the general belief among the poor that the cholera epidemic is some kind of conspiracy? Are the wealthier characters also victimized or in some way injured by this social chasm?
8. Is there a metaphorical significance to Gustine's baby's condition? What do you make of his namelessness and his disease (and Henry's particular interest in it)? Do you think Gustine is attached to her child in ways she would not be if the child had been born perfectly healthy?
9. What function does the Student of Life have in this novel? What does his presence tell the reader about narrative? Is his goal of writing a book "spanning the great gulf that yawns between rich and poor" laughable or laudable?
10. What is the connection between prostitution and anatomy? Is Holman drawing an analogy? Does labor, in the general sense, form the third point of a triangle in this novel? In what ways is The Dress Lodger concerned with the economic uses to which the body is put?
11. What function does the Labor in Vain serve in The Dress Lodger? How does this space in which characters of various social classes congregate, work within the fabric of the novel? How does the name of the public house relate to some of the events of the story? Do the people in this novel labor in vain, and if so, is the pointlessness of their labor inevitable?
12. Henry says that he has "been wed to the graveyard since I first laid eyes on Dr. Knox." Is Henry in some way addicted to dissection? Would such an addiction explain his dubious actions in Edinburgh?
From the B&N Reads Blog
Page 1 of
Related Subjects
Customer Reviews
Explore More Items
