Sydney Carton''s life reimagined. The years before A Tale of Two Cities.
Free download on Oct. 27 and Oct. 28 for Sydney's Story. Amazon Kindle. Many other tablets and phone apps support Kindle reading devices.
KIRKUS REVIEW, excerpted to prevent spoilers:
" Readers of Dickens' Tale of Two Cities know how Sydney Carton ends up, facing the guillotine in Charles Darnay's place; and if not, Granfors (Stairs of Sand, 2011, etc.) reminds the reader by opening his novel with that scene. The mystery of Sydney's life is not where he will end up, but how he got there. Granfors answers that mystery by taking the reader back to Sydney's childhood and showing the series of traumas that have left him the depressive alcoholic we meet in Dickens' novel: (spoilers deleted) Granfors largely avoids scenes that Dickens covered and ably extrapolates Sydney's background from a few comments about his school days. But while Sydney is a tragic figure in Dickens, the injustice and melancholia he suffers here approach cosmic. . .proportions (spoiler deleted) This almost-unrelenting darkness may explain why Sydney becomes an alcoholic."
Autumn 1940. Germany invades Britain. Newport is blitzed. Danny O’Shea’s house is bombed, his wife is killed. While taking his young son Adam to neutral Ireland, they witness an attack on a German convoy. The result is brutal.
Tralee, Ireland. September 1948.
An arrogant, and highly agitated, priest arrives home after 40 years.
Days later he's dead. Suicide? Or did his past catch up with him?
Shanghai Escapist grabs the faint-of-heart right from the get-go and serves up an ultimatum: What would you do if caught in the same circumstances? From the opening scene, the reader is tossed into the maze of daily intrigue as it existed in 1960s-70
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