The Transformation
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Tampa, Florida, 1898: a frontier where the old world meets the new. Dominating the town is the new Tampa Bay Hotel, a fairy-tale castle by the water's edge, and a winter magnet for the rich and famous. But the hotel has one permanent resident, the enigmatic and exotic Monsieur Goulet III, amateur phrenologist and wig-maker to anyone with pockets deep enough.
As the winter of 1898 nears its end, Goulet becomes entranced by the spectacular silver-blonde hair of a beautiful young widow, Marion Unger, and determines that the transformation it inspires him to create will be his masterpiece. But the raw material he needs is hard to come by, and so he is driven to increasingly extreme efforts. As the fates of widow and wigmakerbecome ever more tightly entwined, Goulet's true nature begins to show itself, until it becomes clear that he will allow nothing to impede the progress of his ultimate transformation.
'Set in Tampa, Florida, in 1898, Chidgey evokes a world that is decadent, louche, colourful and verging on the gothic; a highly original read, and as beautiful as it is terrifying, this really is a novel to get lost in' Sunday Express
'Chidgey is a gifted writer, and her confident, commanding prose and vivid atmospherics hold the attention' Guardian
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Swampy late 19th-century Tampa Bay is the unlikely romantic setting for this poignant historical novel by New Zealander Chidgey (The Strength of the Sun). Upon the construction of the Tampa Bay Hotel, a Byzantine fairy tale castle that soon attracts fashionable winter travelers, three eccentric American-made personalities descend on the town: a wig maker, a cigar factory worker and a Detroit widow. Marion Unger, a young Detroit wife, had arrived with her bricklayer husband, Jack, who helped build the hotel; he dies soon after its completion. In mourning, Marion finds her way to inimitable Parisian perruquier Lucien Goulet III, recently installed in the Tampa area to make his fortune; he weaves a memorial bracelet for her out of her hair and her late husband's, and becomes obsessed by her white-blonde tresses. Meanwhile, a Cuban immigrant teenager Rafael M ndez, employed as a roller in the local Ybor City cigar factory, is intent on aiding his country in the throes of revolution. When Rafael goes to work at night for the conniving Goulet picking through people's trash to search for hanks of hair he meets the chaste, rather na ve Marion and falls in love with her. A "transformation" is the sort of stupendous architectural hairpiece designed by M. Goulet, but here it also stands for the changes ushering in a motley new society. Incorporating her research with an organic touch, Chidgey constructs a tale as enchanting as the hotel rising from its Florida swamp.
