The Quincunx : The Inheritance of John Huffam by Palliser, Charles - 1990

UK: Canongate, 1990. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 6.25" x 9.5. H/B 788 pages, condition is Very good. Street maps as endpapers. Charles Palliser's celebrated novel has already been hailed as a masterpiece. It is a full-bodied 19th century page-turner of novel set in Regency London, thick with characters of all classes, with plots, counterplots and forebodings. Its hero, John Huffam, growing up in the north of England with his mother, learns that he has been born into a chancery suit involving his great-grandfather's estate. He is at the centre of a battle involving five families - the Huffams, the Mompessons, the Clothiers, the Palphramonds and the Maliphants. One faction want John alive, and to purchase a codicil held by his mother, the other factions want him and his mother dead. When John's mother sinks in to a pauper's grave after their escape to London, the boy vows to fight for his rightful inheritance. The plot enters a maze of missing wills, lost heirs, clandestine marriages, more disputed inheritances, kidnappings, abductions, anonymous communications and murders. It is a record of the violent and corrupt London underworld of the period -a world of poverty and fear for many, of fabulous wealth and luxury for the few. With the obsessive logic of a nightmare, the figure of the quincunx, a figure of five parts. appears at every crucial turning point in John's quest. Herein lies the secret not onlv of John's identity but of the crime that stained his family with blood on his parents' wedding night and for generations before that.