Golden Hill

Golden Hill

Francis Spufford

#1735 of 8,085 books · #285 in Historical Fiction

Shortlisted for the Writers' Prize (2017) and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction (2017).

Golden Hill won the Costa First Novel Award, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was a Wall Street Journal Top Ten Fiction Book of the Year, a Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of the Year, a Seattle Times Favorite Book of the Year, an NPR Best Book of the Year, a Kirkus Reviews Best Historical Fiction Book of the Year, and a Library Journal Top Historical Fiction Book of the Year. The spectacular first novel from acclaimed nonfiction author Francis Spufford follows the adventures of a mysterious young man in mid-18th-century Manhattan, thirty years before the American Revolution. New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan island, 1746. One rainy evening in November, a handsome young stranger fresh off the boat arrives at a countinghouse door on Golden Hill Street: this is Mr. Smith, amiable, charming, yet strangely determined to keep suspicion shimmering. For in his pocket, he has what seems to be an order for a thousand pounds, a huge sum, and he won't explain why, or where he comes from, or what he is planning to do in the colonies that requires so much money. Should the New York merchants trust him? Should they risk their credit and refuse to pay? Should they befriend him, seduce him, arrest him; maybe even kill him? Rich in language and historical perception, yet compulsively readable, Golden Hill is a remarkable achievement—remarkable, especially, in its intelligent re-creation of the early years of what was to become America's greatest city. Spufford paints an irresistible picture of a New York provokingly different from its later metropolitan self, but already entirely a place where a young man with a fast tongue can invent himself afresh, fall in love—and find a world of trouble.