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THE SERVANTS' QUARTERS
By: Lynn Freed
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
May 2009
On Sale: April 27, 2009
256 pages
ISBN: 0151012881
EAN: 9780151012886
Hardcover
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Fiction
The Servantsβ Quarters, a complex and sophisticated love story, evokes a vanishing world of privilege with a Pygmalion twist. Haunted by phantoms of the Second World War and the Holocaust, young Cressida lives in terror of George Harding, who, severely disfigured, has returned from the front to recover in his familyβs stately African home. When he plucks young Cressidaβs beautiful mother and her family from financial ruin, establishing them in the old servantsβ quarters of his estate, Cressida is swept into a future inexorably bound to his. In the new setting, she finds that she is, after all, indentured. She is conscripted to enliven George Hardingβs nephew, the hopelessly timid Edgar, to make him "wild and daring." And she takes on this task with resentful fury, leading the boy astray and, in the process, learning to manipulate differences in power, class, background, and ambition. Only slowly does she come to understand that George Harding himself is watching her. And waiting.
 Media BuzzAll Things Considered - May 29, 2009
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