The Quincunx: The Mompessons

Book excerpt: Desperate times and darker mysteries abound in this extraordinary historical thriller With their savings rapidly running out, and the world turning against them, John and his mother are pursued by bailiffs and forced to move. Taking refuge with the Isbister family, they flee upon discovering a shocking dark side to their hosts. But then their luck seems to change when they discover the hospitable Miss Quilliam. And a way out of debt and disaster seems to offer itself with a momentous decision, one that will shape everything: to sell the most valuable thing they own. Life is never so easy, and cruelty, danger and disease are never far away... The second Part of the unputdownable classic, The Quincunx, is the ideal read for fans of S.J. Parris or Peter Ackroyd. Praise for The Quincunx ‘Grips like steel... it’s a book to make you miss your stop on the bus or the train, keep you up at night and wake you early... a formidable achievement’ Kaleidoscope, BBC Radio 4 ‘His brilliant and entertaining pastiche of the mid-nineteenth-century novel’ The Times ‘A brilliant and deeply eccentric attempt to reproduce an early Victorian novel...it combines massive scope with minute detail – there is a cast of thousands, but every figure is lovingly painted. The plot is so thick the spoon stands up in it, and by the end, the reader has toured the whole of late Regency society... Magnificent – gripping and beautifully written; the sort of book that sends you into a trance of pleasure’ Independent ‘Charles Palliser has realised a world that can almost be smelt and tasted as it pours off the page of this gripping, extraordinary novel’ Daily Telegraph ‘His plot is of an intricacy that Wilkie Collins himself might have envied... an astonishing achievement’ Scotsman The Quincunx 1 The Huffams 2 The Mompessons 3 The Clothiers 4 The Palphramonds 5 The Maliphants