The Drowning Room - Hardcover

Pye, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0140141200 ISBN 13: 9780140141207

Publisher: Penguin Books / Granta, 1995

Synopsis

In the mid 17th century, when the Dutch first established a settlement on the island of Manhattan, Gretje Reyniers was the town whore. She also lent money and dealt in pelts. She is listed in the court records; whom she slandered and sued; who sued and slandered her back; debts welshed on; debts demanded; minor assaults; charges on lewdness. Michael Pye discovered Gretje Reyniers while researching the early history of New York. Nothing was known about her until she arrived in America, so he has conjured a life for her: a childhood in Amsterdam in the 1620s, where she grew up working with the fishwives, as a maid to a whore; where she has a child, married, was widowed until her emigration to the colonies. This book is part history, part love story, part memoir, and above all, an account of one woman's life.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Pye writes for a living--as a novelist, journalist, historian, and sometimes broadcaster. He is English by birth, but civilized by study in Italy and a newspaper apprenticeship in Scotland. For 20 years he commuted between New York and Europe as a political and cultural columnist for British newspapers. He now lives with his partner John Holm in a tiny village in the forests of rural Portugal. He has published ten books, and is proud of some of them: The Movie Brats, written with Lynda Myles, which was the first serious study of what the Scorsese generation did to Hollywood; King Over The Water, which exposed the machinations of the Duke of Windsor in the wartime Bahamas; Maximum City, the biography of New York which set out to find the roots and history of the city's magic; The Drowning Room, a novel on the first whore of New York in its wild Dutch days; and, of course, Taking Lives.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books / Granta
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0140141200
• ISBN 13: 9780140141207
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256