A01=Michael Irwin
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Author_Michael Irwin
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Category1=Fiction
Category=F
Category=FGU
Category=FV
COP=UNITED KINGDOM
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
Eighteenth Century
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_historical-fiction
eq_isMigrated=2
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Great
Language_Others
London
Price_€10 to €20
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9780007476350
- Weight: 360g
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 24 Apr 2014
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Publication City/Country: GB
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Set in England in the early 1760s, this is a chilling and deliciously dark tale of manipulation, sex, and seduction. When Richard Fenwick, a young man without family or means, returns to London from the Grand Tour, his wealthy godfather, James Gilbert, has an unexpected proposition. Gilbert has led a fastidious life in Worcestershire, but now in his advancing years, he feels the urge to experience, even vicariously, the extremes of human feeling-love and passion, adultery and deceit-along with something much more sinister.
He has selected Fenwick to be his proxy, and his ward has no option but to accept. But Gilbert's elaborate and manipulative "experiments" into the workings of human behaviour drag Fenwick into a vortex of betrayal and danger where lives are ruined and tragedy is always one small step away. And when Fenwick falls in love with one of Gilbert's pawns and the stakes rise even higher - is it too late for him to escape the Faustian pact?
After teaching at the Catholic University of Lublin and the University of Lodz, both in Poland, at the University of Tokyo and at Smith College in the United States, Michael Irwin moved to the University of Kent, in Canterbury, where he became Professor of English, specialising in eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature. His published eighteenth-century work includes a full-length study of Fielding and essays that take in Defoe, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, Johnson and Pope.
