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Gustine--the dress lodger--is a potter's assistant by day, sex worker by night. Her overbearing pimp and landlord has her permanently shadowed by the indefatigable, mysterious old woman known only as Eye to guard his investment in the startling blue dress in which she rents herself, explaining that: "dress lodging works on this basic principle: a cheap whore is given a fancy dress as a higher class of prostitute, the higher the station of the clientèle; the higher the station, the higher the price." Gustine's dress beckons a high-class punter pursued by a dubious fallen past in the figure of Dr Henry Chiver, an ambitious young surgeon who has fled Edinburgh to escape the professional scandal attending on his implication in the convictions of infamous pioneer anatomists Burke and Hare for murder and graverobbing. The heart is the favourite organ, "the singular fascination of his life", for Henry Chiver, desperate to re-establish his tarnished reputation through medical discovery. For this, and his paying students restless for induction into the arts of the scalpel, Chiver requires dead bodies for dissection, to the horror of his naïve, philanthropic fiancée Audrey Place. But it is 1831: the Anatomy Act has yet to pass through parliament to enable medics to legally obtain the corpses so critical to their accurate practice, and a suspicious public is terrifying itself with stories of murderous "burkers".
Streetsmart Gustine, "a rented self", hostile pragmatist trapped in unrelenting poverty, is all heart for her nameless little son who wears--literally--his heart on the outside, a rare case of ectopia cordis; just the kind of anatomical anomaly whose study would make the name of the aspirant but stigmatised Henry. Amid the gathering momentum of cholera epidemic, the two strike up a fatal pact: life for Gustine's son in exchange for a fresh supply of dead bodies for Chiver's scientific dissection. With mordant Dickensian wit and Elizabeth Gaskell's deft touch for gutsy outcast women seizing control of their destiny, Holman carves out a richly imaginative adventure as incisive and gruesomely fascinating as a 19th-century operating theatre. --Rachel Holmes
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. 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. Now in paperback, this national bestseller is a stunning exploration of sinister Industrial England and the dark secrets of 19th-century medical science--a historical thriller charged with a distinctly modern voice. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780802144928
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