The Warlow Experiment

Named one of the best books of 2019 by the Daily Mail, The Sunday Times (London), and the BBC An utterly transporting and original historical novel about an eighteenth-century experiment in personal isolation that yields unexpected--and deeply, shatteringly human--results. "The best kind of historical fiction. Alix Nathan is an original, with a virtuoso touch." --Hilary Mantel Herbert Powyss lives in an estate in the Welsh Marches, with enough time and income to pursue a gentleman's fashionable investigations and experiments in botany. But he longs to make his mark in the field of science--something consequential enough to present to the Royal Society in London. He hits on a radical experiment in isolation: For seven years a subject will inhabit three rooms in the basement of the manor house, fitted out with rugs, books, paintings, and even a chamber organ. Meals will arrive thrice daily via a dumbwaiter. The solitude will be totally unrelieved by any social contact whatsoever; the subject will keep a diary of his daily thoughts and actions. The pay: fifty pounds per annum, for life. Only one man is desperate to apply for the job: John Warlow, a semi-literate laborer with a wife and six children to provide for. The experiment, a classic Enlightenment exercise gone more than a little mad, will have unforeseen consequences for all included.

Named one of the best books of 2019 by the Daily Mail, The Sunday Times (London), and the BBC An utterly transporting and original historical novel about an eighteenth-century experiment in personal isolation that yields unexpected--and deeply, shatteringly human--results. "The best kind of historical fiction. Alix Nathan is an original, with a virtuoso touch." --Hilary Mantel Herbert Powyss lives in an estate in the Welsh Marches, with enough time and income to pursue a gentleman's fashionable investigations and experiments in botany. But he longs to make his mark in the field of science--something consequential enough to present to the Royal Society in London. He hits on a radical experiment in isolation: For seven years a subject will inhabit three rooms in the basement of the manor house, fitted out with rugs, books, paintings, and even a chamber organ. Meals will arrive thrice daily via a dumbwaiter. The solitude will be totally unrelieved by any social contact whatsoever; the subject will keep a diary of his daily thoughts and actions. The pay: fifty pounds per annum, for life. Only one man is desperate to apply for the job: John Warlow, a semi-literate laborer with a wife and six children to provide for. The experiment, a classic Enlightenment exercise gone more than a little mad, will have unforeseen consequences for all included.

'Unsettling and strange, Sea Change, cements Nathan's reputation as one of our most interesting historical novelists.' The Times AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4 'I'll be back soon, my love. Tonight, I hope.' The last Eve saw of her mother was a wave from the basket of a rising balloon. A wilful, lonely orphan in the house of her erratic artist guardian, Eve struggles to retain the image of her missing mother and the father she never knew. In a London beset by pageantry, incipient riot and the fear of Napoleonic invasion, Eve must grow into a young woman with no one to guide her through its perils. Far away, in a Norfolk fishing village, the Rev Snead preaches hellfire and damnation to his impoverished parishioners and oppressed wife. Snead illustrates his sermons with the example of a mute woman pulled from the sea, over whom he keeps a very close watch indeed.

On a rainy night in Philadelphia's Ninth Street Market, sixteen-year-old Fiora, newly-orphaned by the 1918 influenza epidemic, is dumped at an old man's door. Daughter of the local fortune teller, Fiora arrives with a little money, a lot of attitude, and her mother's formidable reputation. The old man, a widowed shoemaker ticking down his clock, is the only person in their superstitious immigrant community brave enough to stand between Fiora and an orphanage. Fiora?s a modern, forward-thinking young woman, uninterested in using old-world magic to make a way for herself?but when her mother's magical curtain shows her that the old man will shortly die of a heart attack, Fiora panics, and casts her entire neighborhood into a stagnant bubble of time. A bubble where everything continues but nothing progresses?tomatoes won?t ripen, babies refuse to be born, and the sick suffer under the weight of a never-ending stream of unspent seconds. Not everything in the bubble is bad. Love, fresh and fascinating, ignites. Friendships take root. But as day drags into interminable day, the pressure inside the bubble world builds. Fiora must accept that not everything found can be kept, not everything saved will remain, and unless Fiora finds the courage to collapse the bubble, every one of her hopes will be trapped inside an unbearable, unyielding, unpredictable, and infinite Now.

Born in her father's coffee house in Change Alley, London, Sarah Battle is raised in an atmosphere of coffee, alcohol and intrigue. After witnessing the destruction and chaos of the Gordon Riots, she longs to escape her surroundings for a better life but is trapped in a marriage to James Wintrige, a member of the Corresponding Society but also a government spy. She meets the radical thinker, printer and bookseller Thomas Cranch who offers her an escape to the New World. Sarah finds solace in her new love and the thriving, democratic world of Philadelphia. But fate may yet deliver her back to London. She has never secured a divorce from her husband and the Change Alley coffee house is still hers. The Flight of Sarah Battle is set in the turbulent last decade of the eighteenth century in a London where riot constantly rumbles and Bartholomew Fair entertains, and against the promises and excitement of Philadelphia, where new building, hope and a democracy not quite fully realised are shadowed by the terrible threat of fever and war.

“I can think of a hundred ways already in which the war has “brought us to our senses.” But it oughtn’t to need a war to make a nation paint its kerbstones white, carry rear-lamps on its bicycles, and give all its slum children a holiday in the country.” That’s just one sample of Mrs. Miniver’s homespun philosophy. Meet Mrs. Miniver. She is the universal, heart-warming symbol of the endurable and pleasant sides of existence. Against the shadow of the present she holds up to view the everyday domesticities, the comings and goings of family life, and finds them good. Mrs. Miniver at tea, Mrs. Miniver trying to discover what the windshield wiper is really saying, Mrs. Miniver and her three unpredictable children and her altogether too-predictable husband, Mrs. Miniver and the woman who said she could only accept the Really Nice Children as évacués—the writing and characters in these thumbnail sketches are disarmingly simple and recognizable, and yet, by the author’s gift of intense observation, the ordinary becomes extraordinary and important.

“One of those can’t-put-it-down-until-the-last-page-is-turned monsters that has readers all over the country missing sleep.”—Minneapolis Tribune Corky is a brilliant entertainer with a bright future ahead of him. He has good looks, many women, and enormous talent. He also had a secret and a certainty: a secret that must be hidden from his public at all costs; and a certainty that the dark forces of magic were out to destroy him. “Fascinating . . . This dazzling psychological thriller cannot be put down! . . . The most imaginative and enjoyable novel I've read since Marathon Man. . . . [A] bizarre journey into the world of illusion.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch “Kept me up half the night. . . . A brilliantly alarming novel!”—Cosmopolitan

Travel to the revolutionary closing years of 18th century England. Meet Jack Cockshutt, arsonist by trade, returning to rescue his victims and profit from their relief, finding the woman who just might save him. Meet the beauty who castigates her customers with passages from Paine's Rights of Man; the boy who raises the tricolour on the White Tower.