To celebrate my new Victorian gothic novel entering the Sunday Times Best Seller List at number 10, I'd like to post a very short reading from the first pages of The Fascination. But first of all, here is a brief description of what the novel is about...
Victorian England.
A world of rural fairgrounds and glamorous London theatres.
A world of dark secrets and deadly obsessions…
Twin sisters, Keziah and Tilly Lovell, are identical in every way, except that Tilly hasn't grown a single inch since she was five. Coerced into promoting their father's quack elixir as they tour the country fairgrounds, at the age of fifteen the girls are sold to a mysterious Italian known as ‘Captain’.
Theo is an orphan, raised by his grandfather, Lord Seabrook, a man with a dark interest in anatomical freaks and other curiosities. Resenting his grandson for his mother’s death in childbirth, when Seabrook remarries and a new heir is produced Theo leaves his home without a penny to his name, finding employment in a London Museum of Anatomy where, by chance, he meets with Captain – and in turn with a theatrical ‘family’ of performers, freaks, and outcasts. But it is Theo’s fascination with Tilly and Keziah that will lead all of them into a web of deceits, where the darkest of secrets threaten everything they know…
Exploring universal themes of grief, loss and love, the power of redemption, and what it means to be unique, The Fascination is a bewitching gothic novel that brings alive Victorian London – and all the darkness and deception beneath the glitter of the surface.