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The Conviction of Cora Burns
Carolyn Kirby
Dzanc Books
May 2019
On Sale: May 7, 2019
296 pages ISBN: 1945814845 EAN: 9781945814846 Trade Size
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Historical | Women's Fiction Historical
1880s Birmingham, England: A troubled young woman searches
for her lost sister and the truth behind a grisly crime in
this Victorian thriller in the style of The Essex
Serpent and See What I Have
Done.
London, 1885:Cora Burns has always
struggled to control the violence inside of her. Does this
temperament come from the mother she never knew, a convict
who gave birth to her in jail? Or is Cora a product of her
harsh upbringing in the workhouse, where her only light was
a girl named Alice Salt, so like Cora that they were almost
sisters.
Just released from Birmingham Gaol, Cora
sets out to find Alice. But her memories of Alice are hazy,
entangled with the memories of a terrible crime: the murder
of a little boy in the workhouse. Her sole clue is a bronze
medal cut in half, engraved with the word SALT.
Cora
finds work as a servant in the home of Thomas Jerwood, a
gentleman-scientist obsessed with the study of hereditary
criminality. Here Cora befriends a young girl, Violet, who
seems to be the subject of a living experiment into
upbringing and character. But are there two identical girls
called Violet? And is Jerwood also secretly studying Cora?
As the secrets of her past unravel, Cora must decide if her
own scarred nature is an unalterable product of biology or
if she has the strength to change.
With the power and
intrigue of Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder and Sarah
Schmidt’s See What I Have Done, Carolyn Kirby’s debut
novel delves into Victorian London’s dark underbelly and the
question of where we first learn violence: from our scars or
from our hearts.
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