Local Customs
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Nominated for the 2016 Forest of Reading Evergreen Award
Nominated for the 2014 Victoria Book Prize
An Englishwoman’s mysterious death in 19th-century West Africa haunts those left behind.
Letitia Landon, "Letty" to her friends, is an intelligent, witty, successful writer, much sought after for dinner parties and soirées in the London of the 1830s. But, still single at thirty-six, she fears ending up as a wizened crone in a dilapidated country cottage, a cat her only companion.
Just as she is beginning to believe she will never marry, she meets George Maclean, home on leave from his position as the governor of Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast of West Africa. George and Letty marry quietly and set sail for Cape Coast. Eight weeks later she is dead — not from malaria or dysentery or any of the multitude of dangers in her new home, but by her own hand. Or so it would seem.
Local Customs examines, in poetic detail, a way of life that has faded into history. It was a time when religious and cultural assimilation in the British colonies gave rise to a new, strange social order. Letty speaks from beyond the grave to let the reader see the world through her eyes and explore the mystery of her death. Was she disturbed enough to kill herself, or was someone — or something — else involved?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A sense of mystery and foreboding permeates Thomas's latest novel. Almost 40 years after visiting the graves of British authoress-poet Letitia Landon and her husband George Maclean, Thomas (Intertidal Life) crafts a story of what might have transpired between 1836 and 1838, in London and the Gold Coast. Landon, from a "shabby-genteel" family with a past that brought "malicious whispers," sets her sights on marrying George, governor of Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast of West Africa. Much is made of Letitia's slightness and her husband's foolhardiness in bringing her to its unforgiving climate where "the men die like flies." Letitia, however, seems to thrive initially, but dies after eight weeks in Africa, presumably from an accidental dose of prussic acid, although strange objects such as dolls and bats had appeared outside her bedchamber. The story is recounted in the voices of the various players: Letitia, George, Thomas Birch Freeman (a black Wesleyan missionary), Brodie Cruickshank (a military man smitten with Letitia), a young servant-cook Isaac, and Mrs. Partridge (the chief steward's wife) and reads like a diary providing a glimpse of 19th-century life. Thomas nicely blends fact with fiction as she speculates about the life and death of the curious and complicated Letitia. An enjoyable read.
