"Reeling with revenge, cut-throat smugglers, and the indomitable spirit of its heroine, this is historic fiction at its most riveting and evocative."
Set in an English smuggling town in 1742, Alex Preston’s Winchelsea tells a thoroughly gripping, atmospheric tale of a young woman’s journey from life as a gentlewoman, to smuggler, to pirate in the name of avenging her father’s murder. Shot-through with much mystery, desire and vengeance, this is Moonfleet meets du Maurier, with deliciously evocative language that conjures a wonderful sense of time, place and its heroine’s engagingly headstrong character.
As a baby, Goody Brown was recused from drowning and taken in by a wealthy couple in Winchelsea, where smugglers’ command of the windswept cliffs, coves and secret caves seeps into all aspects of life. As Goody’s beloved brother Francis declares (he was himself adopted by her parents after escaping enslavement), “It is a time for brazen men… A time for the shameless, the vulturous, the shillers and under-merchants to thrive while honest folk struggle and starve”. This is borne out when their father is murdered by a group of men he’d considered to be friends. Already wildly discontent with the prospect of living a gentlewoman’s life, this tragedy spurs Goody to devote herself to avenging his death, setting her on a perilous, exhilarating path of smuggling, piracy and personal transformation.
| Primary Genre | Literary Fiction |
| Other Genres: | |
| Recommendations: |
Win Two Tickets to see To Kill A Mockingbird live on stage at Wyndham's Theatre
Closing date: 01/07/2026
The year is 1742. Goody Brown, saved from drowning and adopted when just a babe, has grown up happily in the smuggling town of Winchelsea. Then, when Goody turns sixteen, her father is murdered in the night by men he thought were friends.
To find justice in a lawless land, Goody must enter the cut-throat world of her father's killers. With her beloved brother Francis, she joins a rival gang of smugglers. Facing high seas and desperate villains, she also discovers something else: an existence without constraints or expectations, a taste for danger that makes her blood run fast.
Goody was never born to be a gentlewoman. But what will she become instead?
Winchelsea is an electrifying story of vengeance and transformation; a rare, lyrical and transporting work of historical imagination that makes the past so real we can touch it.
Winchelsea features in the following genres: Historical Fiction, General Fiction, Narrative theme: Sense of place, Narrative theme: Coming of age, Fiction, Fiction: narrative themes, Books of the Month, Recommendations, Literary Fiction
Winchelsea is available in Paperback, Hardback, Ebook
Winchelsea was written by Alex Preston and published by Canongate an imprint of Canongate Books
Winchelsea has 333 pages
£8.99
