The devastating consequences of the slave trade in 18th century are explored through the powerful but impossible attraction of well-born Frances and her slave, Mehuru. From the bestselling author of The Other Boleyn Girl. Bristol in 1787 is booming, from its stinking docks to its elegant new houses. Josiah Cole, a small dockside trader, is prepared to gamble everything to join the big players of the city. But he needs ready cash and a well-connected wife. An arranged marriage to Frances Scott is a ...
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The devastating consequences of the slave trade in 18th century are explored through the powerful but impossible attraction of well-born Frances and her slave, Mehuru. From the bestselling author of The Other Boleyn Girl. Bristol in 1787 is booming, from its stinking docks to its elegant new houses. Josiah Cole, a small dockside trader, is prepared to gamble everything to join the big players of the city. But he needs ready cash and a well-connected wife. An arranged marriage to Frances Scott is a mutually convenient solution. Trading her social contacts for Josiah's protection, Frances enters the world of the Bristol merchants and finds her life and fortune dependent on the respectable trade of sugar, rum and slaves. Once again Philippa Gregory brings her unique combination of a vivid sense of history and inimitable storytelling skills to illuminate a complex period of our past. Powerful, haunting, intensely disturbing, this is a novel of desire and shame, of individuals, of a society, and of a whole continent devastated by the greed of others.
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Add this copy of A Respectable Trade (Historical Novels) to cart. $0.99, fair condition, Sold by ZBK Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Woodland Park, NJ, UNITED STATES, published 2007 by Atria Books.
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Fair. May contain writing notes highlighting bends or folds. Text is readable book is clean and pages and cover mostly intact. May show normal wear and tear. Item may be missing CD. May include library marks. Fast Shipping.
Add this copy of A Respectable Trade (Historical Novels) to cart. $1.20, good condition, Sold by Gulf Coast Books rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Memphis, TN, UNITED STATES, published 2007 by Washington Square Press.
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Add this copy of A Respectable Trade (Historical Novels) to cart. $1.20, fair condition, Sold by Orion Tech rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Arlington, TX, UNITED STATES, published 2007 by Washington Square Press.
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Fair. The item is very worn but continues to work perfectly. Signs of wear can include aesthetic issues such as scratches, dents, worn and creased covers, folded page corners and minor liquid stains. All pages and the cover are intact, but the dust cover may be missing. Pages may include moderate to heavy amount of notes and highlighting, but the text is not obscured or unreadable. Page edges may have foxing (age related spots and browning). May NOT include discs, access code or other supplemental materials.
Add this copy of A Respectable Trade to cart. $3.00, very good condition, Sold by Heritage Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Southampton, MA, UNITED STATES, published 2007 by Touchstone.
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Very Good + No DJ. Printing Not Spec. n/a. 12mo = 7-9" 488pp. Trade paperback. Clean interior and exterior. No highlights or markings in text. Strong and tight binding.
Fans of Ms Gregory?s phenomenally successful Tudor novels will encounter a more somber, pensive writer in A Respectable Trade. Re-issued by Touchstone, this novel set in 18th century Bristol offers a painful glimpse into the flourishing slave trade of the era, which enabled the majority of England?s enterprising merchants and the nation at large to amass fortunes at the cost of unimaginable human suffering. Rather than opt for comfortable characters and pat storylines, Ms Gregory has crafted a quiet, powerful meditation on the nature of mankind?s inhumanity toward our fellow man, and the compromises we make to excuse and obscure our choices. Through the view points of three main characters?Frances Scott, a fragile spinster who marries beneath her rank because of penury and finds herself caught between two worlds, neither of which she fully belongs to; her husband Josiah Cole, an ambitious, morally ambivalent and gullible merchant determined to succeed no matter the cost; and Mehuru, a sage African priest who is kidnapped and brought to England in chains by the Coles? we are lured into a time of pretense and grim contradiction, where silk wallpaper and elegant ascendancy conceal the poison of avarice and near-insurmountable barriers of class, all of which have become dependent on commerce with human beings. While Josiah throws everything he has on the line for the sake of advancement in a society that despises his kind, Frances plunges into a fantastical and ultimately destructive love affair with Mehuru, whose elegant stoicism illuminates the devastation that slavery has wrought upon Africa. Threaded throughout the novel is the character of England itself?satiated on the so-called respectable trade it has perpetuated, violently divided over the torment it has caused, and poised on the edge of irrevocable change.