Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, The

It began with a simple note: a letter of rejection from Miss Temple’s fiancé, written on crisp Ministry paper and delivered on her maid’s silver tray. But for Miss Temple, Roger Bascombe’s cruel rejection will ignite a harrowing quest for answers, plunging her into a mystery as dizzying as a hall of mirrors — and a remote estate where danger abounds and all inhibitions are stripped bare.…Thus begins Gordon Dahlquist’s debut novel of Victorian suspense — at once a dazzling feast for the senses and a beguiling, erotic literary adventure.

Nothing could have prepared Miss Temple for where her pursuit of Roger Bascombe would take her — or for the shocking things she would find behind the closed doors of forbidding Harschmort Manor: men and women in provocative disguise, acts of licentiousness and violence, heroism and awakening. But she will also find two allies: Cardinal Chang, a brutal assassin with the heart of a poet, and a royal doctor named Svenson, at once fumbling and heroic — both of whom, like her, lost someone at Harschmort Manor. As the unlikely trio search for answers — hurtling them from elegant brothels to gaslit alleyways to shocking moments of self-discovery — they are confronted by puzzles within puzzles. And the closer they get to the truth, the more their lives are in danger. For the conspiracy they face — an astonishing alchemy of science, perverted religion, and lust for power — is so terrifying as to be beyond belief.

In a novel that shatters conventions and seethes with danger and eroticism, Gordon Dahlquist has made a spectacular literary debut. And in Miss Temple he has created an unforgettable guide through a disturbing, seductive, and all-too-real world. By turns brutal and tender, shocking and deliciously romantic, The Glass Books of The Dream Eaters is a novel for the ages, a bold and brilliant work of the imagination.