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Motherless Alathea Sawneyford, her charms grown disturbing as she rebels against her father, has made the city’s streets her own, while Annie Cantabile is constrained, by her own disfigurement and her father, to his pianoforte workshop under the shadow of Tyburn gibbet. One afternoon the dusty workshop receives a visitor. A man, representing an unscrupulous band of City speculators, Alathea’s father among them, require a pianoforte and its charming teacher to find titled husbands for all their daughters: sisters Evelina and Marianne; stolid Harriet and pale, pining Georgiana. It seems an innocent enough plan but these are subversive times and perhaps even a drawing-room piano lesson isn’t exactly what it seems. All of which will suit Alathea perfectly.
Fierce and bawdy, uproarious and exquisite, Sedition takes its plot at a racing gallop: bold, beautiful and captivating, it is a narrative masterpiece.
Fierce and bawdy, uproarious and exquisite, Sedition takes its plot at a racing gallop: bold, beautiful and captivating, it is a narrative masterpiece.
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Reviews
A sly, witty, deliciously knowing treat . . . [a] fascinating debut
You will be seduced as surely as Katie Grant's young ladies in this masterpiece of salacious wit. THIS is one of those precious novels. The kind that bookworms burrow inside to devour with relish from cover to cover. The kind you'll secrete behind all the other books on your shelves in case friends steal it and somehow "forget" to give it back. The kind from which you'll read chosen snippets to your offspring when they're old enough. An induction into the magical unruliness of words. Not a dull or superfluous page
Deliciously dark, transgressive and surprising . . . LaClos (Dangerous Liaisons) would have dived under the covers with delight and swallowed it in one sitting
Thrillingly subversive
Packed with colourful characters . . . this is an original, winningly imagined tale
Grant captures a dizzying sense of a world being remade simultaneously by bankers and Bach
A subversive and thrilling gothic tale, it will keep you up all night. It's the sort of novel you say you'll read for only ten more minutes because it's already way past your bedtime. Two hours later, your light is still on
In its fairly irresistible combination of transgressive sex and a richly layered evocation of history, Sedition demands comparison with Sarah Waters' untouchably brilliant novels . . . a properly subversive and quite unforgettable novel