When Harriet, a working-class girl who, with her friend Mary has left her coastal job of collecting and gutting fish, stops on a bridge in her newly adopted home in York, she is approached by an upper-class gentleman. Samuel is a Quaker, a good soul, and a man interested in the new science of photography. He also collects photographs of working-class girls in their working clothes. Samuel invites the girls to come to his friend's studio. While Mary is almost instantly lost to the art of photography, Harriet, a sturdier sort, goes on to get a job in the Quaker-owned Wetherby's Chocolate Factory. She soon catches the eye of a young clerk who is one of the favourites of the owners and through him discovers the deadly rivalry between the chocolate-makers. Samuel is also taken with the young Harriet, though because of class, he watches her from afar, until his sister - 'mad Grace' locked away in an asylum - becomes part of their mutual story. Set in York in the early 1900s, The Sweetest Thing is a true Victorian novel with a large cast and wonderfully intriguing subplots, set at a moment of great social change.
The Sweetest Thing
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The Sweetest Thing captures all the mouth-watering sweetness of desire (for freedom, for cocoa, for a face in a photograph), as well as the dusty grit it leaves on the lips. (Emma Donoghue )
If you are a fan of Sarah Waters or Tracy Chevalier then you will love this. The Sweetest Thing is historical, literary fiction at its very best (OBSERVER )
One of Waterstone's 'Faces of the Future', a new writer who promises to be a huge name (West Sussex OBSERVER )
richly researched, warmly characterised and admirably humane (DAILY MAIL )
If you are a fan of Sarah Waters or Tracy Chevalier then you will love this. The Sweetest Thing is historical, literary fiction at its very best (OBSERVER )
One of Waterstone's 'Faces of the Future', a new writer who promises to be a huge name (West Sussex OBSERVER )
richly researched, warmly characterised and admirably humane (DAILY MAIL )
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* A brilliant historical novel about working girls and upper-class men; about photography and chocolate factories; about mad women and Quakers.
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I was all of sixteen, the first time I met him. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
I was all of sixteen, the first time I met him. Read the first page
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14 of 18 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
If any of the following are true of you - love reading intelligent novels which transport you to another time, are interested in early photography or how the Victorians treated the mentally ill, have ever visited York, like chocolate - then you must read this novel. All of these elements and more are present in this terrific tale of love, ambition and betrayal, set against the backdrop of a Quaker-run cocoa factory in York in the late 1800s. Delicious...
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful
By K Mansfield
Format:Hardcover
Has similarities to Sara Waters' 'Fingersmith' but without the lesbianism. Well-written and well-researched, one is very much transported back into Victorian life with all its gritty realities. The characters are rounded and fully realised, if somewhat perplexing at times as to their motivation. I rather feared from the cover that it would turn out to be a somewhat frothy 'women's novel'but it wasn't at all - I should like to read more by Fiona Shaw.
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