Book Description
This book is on sale on Amazon for $0.99 (regularly $3.99) 7/31/2021 - 8/30/2021!
A brand-new, feel-good, light summer read!
“Pitch-perfect prose and plotting. This Austen-inspired novel echoes the master herself. Emma mingles with Pride and Prejudice in a delightful confrontation between the two books' worlds…” (Publishers Weekly BookLife Prize 2021, 10/10)
“I found the characters colorful and thoroughly entertaining, the dialogue witty and laced with humor… McVeigh writes with a flow and eloquence that makes the narrative as smooth as melted butter, and she perfectly captures the era.” (Readers' Favorite)
“The writing shines… The syntax and nature of early 19th-century prose is mirrored almost perfectly.” (Self-Publishing Review)
“Witty, fun, and has all the hallmarks of an Austen novel.” (Recommended, US Review of Books)
This book is a prequel to Jane Austen's Lady Susan, in which a beautiful but manipulative young widow descends on her sister-in-law’s estate, causing mayhem. In this prequel, Susan is only sixteen.
Like Sense and Sensibility, the novel possesses two heroines, one thoughtful and reserved and one as exuberantly scheming as Emma herself: like Mansfield Park, it involves amateur theatrics; like Pride and Prejudice, it features an elopement. Susan’s character – witty, manipulative, and impudent to the point of recklessness – is the book’s linchpin, but every subplot coalesces in the grand finale, which includes a believable but intensely surprising plot twist. McVeigh has set it a year before Emma, and “borrowed” several of Austen’s more memorable characters – including Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
Alice McVeigh, a London-based ghost writer, has been published by Orion/Hachette in contemporary fiction. (""McVeigh succeeds in harmonising a supremely comic tone with much darker notes."" - The Sunday Times.). She has also written a Kirkus-starred thriller published by UK publishers Unbound (using her pen name, Spaulding Taylor). Susan is the first of a six-book series.