Set in England in 1787, Philippa Gregory's dazzling new historical novel tells of the forbidden romance between a penniless British aristocrat and an enslaved African nobelman. "(Gregory is) the first lady of intelligent historical fiction".--Sunday Times (London).
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Set in England in 1787, Philippa Gregory's dazzling new historical novel tells of the forbidden romance between a penniless British aristocrat and an enslaved African nobelman. "(Gregory is) the first lady of intelligent historical fiction".--Sunday Times (London).
Read Less
Add this copy of A Respectable Trade to cart. $3.52, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Atlanta rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Brownstown, MI, UNITED STATES, published 1995 by HarperCollins Publishers.
Add this copy of A Respectable Trade to cart. $3.52, fair condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Atlanta rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Brownstown, MI, UNITED STATES, published 1995 by HarperCollins Publishers.
Add this copy of A Respectable Trade to cart. $3.52, fair condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Baltimore rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Halethorpe, MD, UNITED STATES, published 1995 by HarperCollins Publishers.
Add this copy of A Respectable Trade to cart. $5.00, very good condition, Sold by HPB Inc. rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Dallas, TX, UNITED STATES, published 1995 by Harpercollins.
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Add this copy of A Respectable Trade to cart. $33.80, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 1995 by Harpercollins.
Add this copy of A Respectable Trade to cart. $36.95, very good condition, Sold by booksbyursula rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Cincinnati, OH, UNITED STATES, published 1995 by HarperCollins Publishers.
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Very good in very good dust jacket. tight copy, clean on inside, light wear to cover and DJ, very light smudges on front of pages. Sewn binding, paper over boards, 479 pgs. Audience: General/trade.
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Add this copy of A Respectable Trade to cart. $159.21, new condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 1995 by Harpercollins.
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.
