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Scribner
September 2013
On Sale: September 10, 2013
438 pages
ISBN: 1451698062
EAN: 9781451698060
Kindle: B00A28HTKO
Hardcover / e-Book
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Historical
A brilliant rendering of a scandalous historical figure, Kate Manningβs My Notorious Life is an ambitious, thrilling novel introducing Axie Muldoon, a fiery heroine for the ages.
Axieβs story begins on the streets of 1860s New York. The impoverished child of Irish immigrants, she grows up to become one of the wealthiest and most controversial women of her day.
In vivid prose, Axie recounts how she is forcibly separated from her mother and siblings, apprenticed to a doctor, and how she and her husband parlay the sale of a few bottles of βLunar Tablets for Female Complaintβ into a thriving midwifery business. Flouting convention and defying the law in the name of womenβs reproductive rights, Axie rises from grim tenement rooms to the splendor of a mansion on Fifth Avenue, amassing wealth while learning over and over never to trust a man who says βtrust me.β
When her services attract outraged headlines, Axie finds herself on a collision course with a crusading officialβAnthony Comstock, founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. It will take all of Axieβs cunning and power to outwit him in the fight to preserve her freedom and everything she holds dear.
Inspired by the true history of an infamous female physician who was once called βthe Wickedest Woman in New York,β My Notorious Life is a mysΒtery, a family saga, a love story, and an exquisitely detailed portrait of nineteenth-century America. Axie Muldoonβs inimitable voice brings the past alive, and her story haunts and enlightens the present.
 Media BuzzStudio 360 - December 14, 2013
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