Harcourt, Inc.
Available: 05/01/07
6 x 9 · 400 pages
978-0-15-101206-0 CDN $28.00 · cl

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The Nature of Monsters

Clare Clark

In The Nature of Monsters, the author of The Great Stink (a New York Times Editor’s Choice, Book Sense Notable Book and Washington Post Best Book of the Year) transports readers to London of the 1700s and an irresistibly modern 16-year-old heroine. With exquisite prose, dark humour and a historian’s eye for detail, Clare Clark offers a creepy and claustrophobic follow-up to her debut, highlighting the limited options for women at that time.

1666: The Great Fire of London sweeps through the streets and a pregnant woman flees the flames. A few months later she gives birth to a child disfigured by a red birthmark.

1718: Sixteen years old and pregnant, Eliza Tally arrives in a rebuilt London as an apothecary’s maid. But why is the apothecary so eager to welcome her when he already has a maid, a deformed half-wit named Mary? Why is Eliza never allowed to look her veiled master in the face? It is only on her visits to the Hugenot bookseller who supplies her master’s scientific tomes that she realizes the nature of his obsession. And when she learns that Mary is pregnant, she knows she has to act to save the child, Mary and herself.

Clare Clark (London) was born in 1967 and is a senior scholar at Trinity College Cambridge. She won the QPB New Voices Award for her debut novel, The Great Stink, which was also a Rocky Mountain News Highly Recommended Debut Novel.