"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 |
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