New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan island, 1746. One rainy evening in November, a handsome young stranger fresh off the boat arrives at a counting house door on Golden Hill Street: this is Mr. Smith, amiable, charming, yet strangely determined to keep suspicion shimmering. For in his pocket, he has what seems to be an order for a thousand pounds, a huge sum, and he won’t explain why, or where he comes from, or what he is planning to do in the colonies that requires so much money. Should the New York merchants trust him? Should they risk their credit and refuse to pay? Should they befriend him, seduce him, arrest him; maybe even kill him?
Set thirty years before the American Revolution, the author captures an ancient iconography of New York not only in his depictions of the physical city and its diverse citizens, currencies and costumes, but also in the clever and pungent language of his prose. Golden Hill is an update of eighteenth-century picaresque novels by the likes of Henry Fielding and entertains us with its savage wit, mystery, charismatic protagonist, and romantic storyline as it propels us toward a powerful revelation at the novel’s end.
Rich in language and historical perception, yet compulsively readable, Golden Hill is an irresistible picture of a New York, provokingly different from its later metropolitan self but subtly shadowed by the great icon to come, and already a place where a young man with a fast tongue can invent himself afresh, fall in love – and find a world of trouble.
by Francis Spufford
Warren Book Club 