Madison House

Book excerpt: PETER DONAHUE’S DEBUT NOVEL MADISON HOUSE, which won the Langum Prize for Historical Fiction 2005, chronicles turn-of-the-century Seattle’s explosive transformation from frontier outpost to major metropolis. Maddie Ingram, owner of Madison House, and her quirky and endearing boarders find their lives inextricably linked when the city decides to re-grade Denny Hill and the fate of Madison House hangs in the balance--Maddie’s albino handyman and furtive love interest, a muckraking black journalist who owns and publishes the Seattle Sentry newspaper, and an aspiring stage actress forced into prostitution and morphine addiction while working in the city’s corrupt vaudeville theater, all call Madison House home. Had E.L. Doctorow and Charles Dickens met on the streets of Seattle, they couldn’t have created a better book.