Thornfield appears far deeper and darker than they pretend. Thornfield, an army doctor returned from the Sikh Wars, and the gracious Sikh butler Mr. Charles Thornfield, who seeks a governess.īurning to know whether she is in fact the rightful heir, Jane takes the position incognito, and learns that Highgate House is full of marvelously strange new residents-the fascinating but caustic Mr. Her aunt has died and her childhood home has a new master: Mr. After years of hiding from the law while penning macabre “last confessions” of the recently hanged, Jane thrills at discovering an advertisement. From international best-selling, multi-award-nominated writer Lyndsay Faye, it's a masterwork of historical suspense.Ī sensitive orphan, Jane Steele suffers first at the hands of her spiteful aunt and predatory cousin, then at a grim school where she fights for her very life until escaping to London, leaving the corpses of her tormentors behind her. To untangle the web of lies and misdeeds around her, Alice will have to answer for her own past, too.Ī richly imagined novel starring two indomitable heroines, The Paragon Hotel at once plumbs the darkest parts of America's past and the most redemptive facets of humanity. And only Alice and her new Paragon 'family' are searching for a missing mulatto child who has mysteriously vanished into the woods. The Ku Klux Klan has arrived in Portland in fearful numbers - burning crosses, electing officials, infiltrating newspapers, and brutalizing Blacks.

Pendleton, the stately Mavereen, and the club chanteuse Blossom Fontaine, she understands their dread. She befriends Max, a Black Pullman porter who reminds her achingly of home and who saves Alice by leading her to the Paragon Hotel.īut her unlikely sanctuary turns out to be an all-Black hotel in a Jim Crow city, and its lodgers seem unduly terrified of a White woman on the premises.

The year is 1921, and 'Nobody' Alice James has just arrived in Oregon with a bullet wound, a lifetime's experience battling the New York Mafia, and 50,000 dollars in illicit cash. A gun moll with a knack for disappearing flees from Prohibition-era Harlem to Portland's Paragon Hotel.

The idiot brain book