Bücher von Philippa Stockley

Set in late eighteenth-century England, Philippa Stockley's American debut gives us a wickedly delightful but deadly serious battle of the wills and the sexes. It begins with the arrival in London of the mysterious Mrs. Fox?on the run from a scandalous French past?who takes a new identity, determined to reinvent herself. She must pit her formidable skills for revenge against Earl Much, a British aristocrat with no less notorious a past and easily her match in sinfulness and intrigue. Between these two swirls a story featuring venal lords, wronged maidens, and reprobate clergymen, transporting readers from bawdy houses to country estates?places where the pleasures of the flesh are both high comedy and serious business. A Factory of Cunning takes readers to the world immortal­ized in Dangerous Liaisons. And, like Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White, the vividly rendered setting and characters give the thrill of a fresh discovery.

Gilver Memmer is running short of time. He is an enormously gifted painter, staggeringly good-looking, and profoundly self-involved, a cross between every woman's dream and every woman's worst nightmare. Great though his creative gifts may be, they cannot save him from dissolution. No longer the London art scene's wunderkind, he is getting by on the fumes of his former luck and sliding inexorably-though with a certain self-destructive elegance-toward oblivion. Into Gilver's life come two women: one who wants to push him into the grave he has been digging for himself and another who just might save him from it.