The Dress Lodger - Softcover

Holman, Sheri

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802144926 ISBN 13: 9780802144928

Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press, 2010

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review

The Dress Lodger, a prostitute's passion for her vulnerable baby and the disgraced doctor who might save him, is engrossing historical fiction. As with all the best fictional history, Sheri Holman's atmospheric, miasmic tale of cholera-struck Sunderland in 1831 is based on fact. "Grave: A place where the dead are laid to await the coming of the medical student": this epigraph casts the novel's thematic lodestone, steering the reader into a deathly plot pursued through streets emanating the sounds, insufferable smells, humour, adversities and disease of an early 19th-century industrial town.

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

Review

"Reminiscent of Wuthering Heights . . . or the novels of Dickens . . . With prose that's limber and vivid."--The New York Times Book Review

"Remarkable . . . A dazzling narrative that pulses with irony, ribald humor, and heartbreaking tragedy."--People (Book of the Week)

"Potent historical fiction . . . Beautifully written . . . A rich read with a Dickensian kick and a moral to be told."--USA Today

"As unsettling as it is brilliant . . . Seamlessly crafted and deserving of wide readership."--The Washington Post Book World

"Part medical thriller, part Greek tragedy, and wholly rewarding."--Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Holman seduces you. Her prose, tart, racy and somber, will sing in your soul a long while."--Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes

"The Dress Lodger is as unsettling as it is brilliant. Holman attempts Herculean feats of plot and character, and the resulting novel is seamlessly crafted and deserving of wide acclaim and readership."--The Washington Post Book World

"The Dress Lodger not just a first-rate entertainment but a moving, enlightening one as well."--The San Francisco Chronicle

"If Clive Barker ever writes a historical novel, he'll be hard pressed to invent horrors more lurid than the rotting corpses and dangling viscera that grace, so to speak, this lurid and fascinating second novel from Holman. . . . An atmospheric tale that may have readers gasping for air. . . . Another stunner from a gifted and versatile new master of historical fiction."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Brilliantly stark portrayal of 19th-century urban life, class warfare, cruel medicine and encroaching pestilence. . . . With remarkable breadth and depth, the narrative vividly portrays the human suffering spawned by the early Industrial Revolution. . . . Holman delivers a wealth of morbid, authentic detail, as well as an emotional pivot in her captivating Moll Flanders-like heroine. The major characters are buttressed by a vivacious cast of minors. . . . Holman's style is risky and direct, treating scenes of Gustine's quick, humiliating back-alley couplings as well as the doctor's hypocritical sleaze, with unflinching emotional precision. This dazzlingly researched epic is an uncommon read."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"The Dress Lodger is Dickensian in a truer sense. . . . In another hundred years, 'Holmanian' may be a short form for tragic thriller, or some such unhelpful sub-category. But for the time being, we can simply appreciate this fine novelist's work on its own terms."--The Globe and Mail (Canada)

"The plot of The Dress Lodger deftly twists and then turns . . . Ms. Holman writes with a remarkable Dickensian flair. . . . The Dress Lodger is a remarkable book."--Richmond Times Dispatch

"With shades of Caleb Carr, Holman digs us up an atmosphere and character while she's unwinding her merciless plot--should anyone really trust a surgeon with no heart?--and the results are both thrilling and, well, sort of yucky. A fine effort."--The San Diego Union Tribune

"Here's a splendid novel to sink your teeth into--your heart and soul as well. . . . The Dress Lodger borders on revelation in the guise of a Dickensian thriller."--Providence Sunday Journal

"Sheri Holman vividly and convincingly conjures a fully textured fictive past peopled with strange and true characters."--Charles Frazier

"A riveting read . . . literate, witty, intelligent, thoughtful."--Kate Atkinson

"Quite Dickensian, in the best sense . . . This is one of those historical novels which has a passionate, angry feel to it, making it more than entertainment (though it is certainly entertaining)."--Margaret Forster

"Sheri Holman writes with extraordinary assurance and style."--Miranda Seymour

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0802144926
• ISBN 13: 9780802144928
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320