FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF REBECCA
‘She wrote exciting plots, she was highly skilled at arousing suspense’ GUARDIAN
‘The novel explores incest in a manner that is entirely unexpected for that period’ JUSTINE PICARDIE
‘One of the last century’s most original literary talents’ DAILY TELEGRAPH
‘His first instinct was to stretch out his hands to the sky. The white clouds seemed so near to him, surely they were easy to hold and to caress, strange-moving things belonging to the wide blue space of heaven . . . ‘
Julius Levy grows up in a peasant family in a village on the banks of the Seine. A quick-witted urchin caught up in the Franco-Prussian War, he is soon forced by tragedy to escape to Algeria. Once there, he learns the ease of swindling, the rewards of love affairs and the value of secrecy.
Before he’s twenty, Julius is in London, where his empire-building begins in earnest and he becomes a rich and very ruthless man. Throughout his life, Julius is driven by a hunger for power, caring nothing for others until his daughter, Gabriel, is born. Julius’ attachment to her will become his strongest bond and his greatest weakness.
‘She wrote exciting plots, she was highly skilled at arousing suspense’ GUARDIAN
‘The novel explores incest in a manner that is entirely unexpected for that period’ JUSTINE PICARDIE
‘One of the last century’s most original literary talents’ DAILY TELEGRAPH
‘His first instinct was to stretch out his hands to the sky. The white clouds seemed so near to him, surely they were easy to hold and to caress, strange-moving things belonging to the wide blue space of heaven . . . ‘
Julius Levy grows up in a peasant family in a village on the banks of the Seine. A quick-witted urchin caught up in the Franco-Prussian War, he is soon forced by tragedy to escape to Algeria. Once there, he learns the ease of swindling, the rewards of love affairs and the value of secrecy.
Before he’s twenty, Julius is in London, where his empire-building begins in earnest and he becomes a rich and very ruthless man. Throughout his life, Julius is driven by a hunger for power, caring nothing for others until his daughter, Gabriel, is born. Julius’ attachment to her will become his strongest bond and his greatest weakness.
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Reviews
This is a tale of such emotional brutality and moral dislocation that it feels as if it's been wrought by a master, someone who has seen, known and grappled with the world
She wrote exciting plots, she was highly skilled at arousing suspense, and she was, too, a writer of fearless originality
One of the last century's most original literary talents
Amazingly well-done, powerful
Entirely unexpected for that period . . . I reject the notion that Du Maurier was 'middlebrow' - she's far too dark, far too subversive for that
