The Great Stink
“Clark’s triumph is that she makes us see and smell everything we politely pretend not to, and she even manages to give the miasma its own kind of beauty…The book is literally breathtaking.”
New York Times Book Review
It is 1855, and William May has returned to London from the battlefields of the Crimea, devastated by the horrors he has suffered on the front line. Back home with his wife and young son, disoriented by the chaos and clamor of the burgeoning city, May tries to rebuild his life.
When he secures a job with Bazalgette to transform the city’s sewer system, he believes it will prove his salvation. But this subterranean world hides its own terrible secrets, and, when a violent murder is committed, a parallel world unfolds beneath London’s streets that will bring May ever closer to the edge of his own destruction.
Praise