The Great Stink [Hardcover]

'Not since Patrick Suskind wrote Perfume has a novelist so effectively made a story reek with atmosphere'

Crisp, assured, and relentlessly pungent. One does not so much read "The Great Stink" as smell, hear and taste it.

'Evocative, deeply researched and thoroughly enjoyable...oozes with the stench of humanity and the secret history of subterranean Victorian London'

‘All the elements of a brisk Gothic thriller’ --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

‘Harrowing’ --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

William May returns to London after the horrors of the Crimean War. Scarred and fragile though he is, he lands a job at the heart of Bazalgette's transformation of the London sewers. There, in the darkness of the stinking tunnels beneath the rising towers of Victorian London May discovers another side of the city and remembers a disturbing, violent past. And then the corruption of the growing city soon begins to overwhelm him and a violent murder is committed. Will the sewers reveal all and show that the world above ground is even darker and more threatening than the tunnels beneath? Beautifully written, evocative and compelling and with a fantastically vivid cast of characters, Clare Clarke's first book is a rich and suspenseful novel that draws the reader right into Victorian London and into the worlds of its characters desperately attempting to swim the tides of change.

Clare Clark was born in London in 1967. A Senior Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, she graduated with a Double First in History. The Great Stink is her first novel. She is married with two children and lives in London.

‘Across the city London was in a state of siege and barricade, fortifications bristling in every street as the mud was carted away and in its place the foundations laid for new and better buildings, faster railways, straighter, broader thoroughfares. The force of progress was constant and unstoppable. It drove tirelessly through the London clay, pushing upwards through the mud into colonnades and spires, downwards into tunnels and buried palaces. The most a man could hope for was to harness that energy, to refine it, so that the spires might be glorious against the morning sky, and the course of the tunnels forever solid and true. And long after the sordid stories of ordinary lives ill-lived had been lost from memory those spires and tunnels would endure…’ --This text refers to the Paperback edition.