Book description
Set in the wild, seamy and extremely strange America of the nineteenth
century: a historical novel so richly involving and so touching that you
never want it to end. Young Ren is missing his parents and a hand and
doesn't know what happened to any of them. So he is beginning to fear
that he will never be claimed from his cold New England orphanage: that
his dream of a family - of a life - will come to nothing. But one day a
glamorous stranger arrives at the orphanage. To Ren's astonishment, the
charming Benjamin Nab says he is his brother, come to bring him home.
And even when his stories grow more and more extraordinary, when he puts
Ren's life in danger again and again and sets him first to theft and
then to grave-robbing, Ren cannot quite abandon hope. That one day all
the hunger and danger and unwanted excitement will be worth it, that he
will find a family. But whether Benjamin is to be trusted is another
story... 'Tinti has written a lightening strike of a novel - beautiful
and haunting and ever so bright. She is a twenty-first-century Robert
Louis Stevenson' Hannah Tinti grew up in Salem, Massachusetts, and
earned her M. A. from New York University's Graduate Creative Writing
Program, where she studied under E. L. Doctorow. She has been awarded
residency fellowships by, among others, the New York State Writers
Institute, and is currently the editor of 'One Story' magazine.
