The American Boy

by Andrew Taylor (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2003

  $7.62

  Interweaving real and fictional elements, The American Boy is a major new literary historical crime novel in the tradition of An Instance of the Fingerpost and Possession. Edgar Allan Poe is the American boy, a child standing on the edge of mysteries. In 1819 two Americans arrive in London, and soon afterwards a bank collapses. A man is found dead and horribly mutilated on a building site. A heiress flirts with her inferiors. A poor schoolmaster struggles to understand what is happening before it destroys him and those he loves. But the truth, like the youthful Poe himself, has its origins in the new world as well as the old. The American Boy is a 21st-century novel with a 19th-century voice. It is both a multi-layered literary murder mystery and a love story, its setting ranging from the coal-scented urban jungle of late Regency London to the stark winter landscapes of rural Gloucestershire. And at its centre is the boy who does not really belong anywhere, an actor who never learns the significance of his part.

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $3.25

  Interweaving real and fictional elements, The American Boy is a major new literary historical crime novel in the tradition of An Instance of the Fingerpost and Possession. Edgar Allan Poe is the American boy, a child standing on the edge of mysteries. In 1819 two Americans arrive in London, and soon afterwards a bank collapses. A man is found dead and horribly mutilated on a building site. A heiress flirts with her inferiors. A poor schoolmaster struggles to understand what is happening before it destroys him and those he loves. But the truth, like the youthful Poe himself, has its origins in the new world as well as the old. The American Boy is a 21st-century novel with a 19th-century voice. It is both a multi-layered literary murder mystery and a love story, its setting ranging from the coal-scented urban jungle of late Regency London to the stark winter landscapes of rural Gloucestershire. And at its centre is the boy who does not really belong anywhere, an actor who never learns the significance of his part.

• New

  Paperback
  2004

  $12.54

  The No. 1 bestseller and award-winning Richard & Judy Book Club pick. An atmospheric and deeply absorbing literary historical crime classic - featured in The Times 'Top Ten Crime Novels of the Decade'. England 1819: Thomas Shield, a new master at a school just outside London, is tutor to a young American boy and the child's sensitive best friend, Charles Frant. Helplessly drawn to Frant's beautiful, unhappy mother, Thomas becomes entwined in their family's affairs. When a brutal murder takes place in London's seedy backstreets, it is not certain who either the victim or the killer is. But all clues seem to lead back to the Frant household, and Shield is tangled in a web of lies, money, sex and death that threatens to tear his new life apart. And what of the strange American boy at the heart of these macabre events - what is the dark secret of young Edgar Allan Poe?