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The Servants' Quarters
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 Servants’ 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 family’s stately African home. When
he plucks young Cressida’s beautiful mother and her family
from financial ruin, establishing them in the old servants’
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 Harding’s
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.
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