Short description
Fingersmith meets Deadwood, The Crimson Petal meets Brokeback Mountain -- filmic, juicy, dramatic historical fiction of the most delicious kind.
Long description
Set in the wild, seamy and extremely strange America of the nineteenth century: a historical novel so richly involving and so touching that you never want it to end. Young Ren is missing his parents and a hand and doesn't know what happened to any of them. So he is beginning to fear that he will never be claimed from his cold New England orphanage: that his dream of a family -- of a life -- will come to nothing. But one day a glamorous stranger arrives at the orphanage. To Ren's astonishment, the charming Benjamin Nab says he is his brother, come to bring him home. And even when his stories grow more and more extraordinary, when he puts Ren's life in danger again and again and sets him first to theft and then to grave-robbing, Ren cannot quite abandon hope. That one day all the hunger and danger and unwanted excitement will be worth it, that he will find a family. But whether Benjamin is to be trusted is another story...
Review
'A confident whirl of a read, with pathos and drama nicely juxtaposed' -- Guardian 'Every once in a while - if you are very lucky - you come upon a novel so marvelous and enchanting and rare that you wish everyone in the world would read it, as well. The Good Thief is just such a book' -- Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love 'Tinti has written a lightening strike of a novel - beautiful and haunting and ever so bright. She is a twenty-first-century Robert Louis Stevenson' -- Junot Diaz 'Tinti is lavish with her storytelling gifts, which are prodigious' -- New York Times Book Review 'Reminds you why you fell in love with reading in the first place' -- Boston Globe