Charles Palliser's work has been hailed as "so compulsively absorbing that reality disappears" (New York Times). Since his extraordinary debut, The Quincunx, his works have sold over one million copies worldwide. With his novel, Rustication, he returns to the town of Thurchester, which he evoked so hauntingly in The Unburied.
It is winter 1863, and Richard Shenstone, aged seventeen, has been sent down--"rusticated"--from Cambridge under a cloud of suspicion. Addicted to opium and tormented by sexual desire, he finds temporary refuge in a...
Charles Palliser's work has been hailed as "so compulsively absorbing that reality disappears" (New York Times). Since his extraordinary d...
On a bleak, wintry morning in Victorian England, Dr Ned Courtine arrives in the sleepy cathedral town of Thurchester for a reunion with his former university friend, Austin Fickling. Over 20 years have passed since they last saw each other, and Fickling appears anxious and gaunt, ravaged by a strange, existential guilt. In order to deflect Courtine's questions from himself, Fickling recounts the story of Thurchester's ghost, William Burgoyne, once a royalist and treasurer of the cathedral who was murdered in the aftermath of the Civil War. The macabre tale of murder and deception captures...
On a bleak, wintry morning in Victorian England, Dr Ned Courtine arrives in the sleepy cathedral town of Thurchester for a reunion with his former uni...
