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The year is 1742. Goody Brown, saved from drowning and adopted when just a babe, has grown up happily in the smuggling town of Winchelsea. Then, when Goody turns sixteen, her father is murdered in the night by men he thought were friends.
To find justice in a lawless land, Goody must enter the cut-throat world of her father's killers. With her beloved brother Francis, she joins a rival gang of smugglers. Facing high seas and desperate villains, she also discovers something else: an existence without constraints or expectations, a taste for danger that makes her blood run fast.
Goody was never born to be a gentlewoman. But what will she become instead?
Winchelsea is an electrifying story of vengeance and transformation; a rare, lyrical and transporting work of historical imagination that makes the past so real we can touch it.
About the author
Alex Preston is an award-winning author of three novels:
This Bleeding City,
The Revelations and
In Love and War, as well as a book of non-fiction
As Kingfishers Catch Fire. He writes regularly for the
Telegraph, the
Economist and
Harper's Bazaar. He reviews books for the
Observer's New Review,
Financial Times and
Spectator. Alex is co-founder of the Corfu Literary Festival and Patron of Oxford Literary Festival.
@ahmpreston
Foreword
AS READ ON BBC RADIO 4
A SPECTATOR BEST OF THE YEAR - AS CHOSEN BY REVIEWERS
In eighteenth-century Sussex, a young girl seeks revenge for the death of her father - an intoxicating historical novel from the acclaimed author of In Love and War
Additional text
The adventures of a wild, cross-dressing teenage girl and a blood-thirsty smugglers' gang in eighteenth-century Sussex. Goody Brown is an unforgettable character and her story utterly gripping
Report
Imagine Daphne du Maurier crossed with Quentin Tarantino, and you will have some idea of just what a thrilling, bloody and heady ride this novel is TOM HOLLAND
