Spufford, Francis "Golden Hill"

Spufford, Francis "Golden Hill: A Novel of Old New York" - 2016

I saw this book first in a German bookstore as a translation. I liked the title. "Neu-York", literally New York in German. The pictures looked more Dutch to me, no wonder, since the main settlers at the time of the novel came from the Netherlands.

Anyway, I was getting curious, so I decided to get the original and read it.

An interesting story. Manhattan in the 18th century. Manhattan in a Dutch style. A young man comes from the Netherlands to claim a high amount of money for a project he is not going to tell anyone anything about. He has to go through a lot of trials and tribulations before he can finally reveal the plan. And it's a good one!

The novel is full of surprises, the writing style is interesting, the setting also. It's an easy but certainly not a boring read. A nice historical novel. humorous as well as informative.

From the back cover:

"New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan island, 1746.

One rainy evening in November, a handsome young stranger fresh off the boat pitches up at a counting-house door in Golden Hill Street: this is Mr Smith, amiable, charming, yet strangely determined to keep suspicion simmering. For in his pocket, he has what seems to be an order for a thousand pounds, a huge amount, and he won't explain why, or where he comes from, or what he can be planning to do in the colonies that requires so much money.

Should the New York merchants trust him? Should they risk their credit and refuse to pay? Should they befriend him, seduce him, arrest him; maybe even kill him?

As fast as a heist movie, as stuffed with incident as a whole shelf of conventional fiction, Golden Hill is both a novel about the 18th century, and itself a book cranked back to the novel's 18th century beginnings, when anything could happen on the page, and usually did, and a hero was not a hero unless he ran the frequent risk of being hanged.

This is Fielding's Tom Jones recast on Broadway - when Broadway was a tree-lined avenue two hundreds yards long, with a fort at one end flying the Union Jack and a common at the other, grazed by cows.

Rich in language and historical perception, yet compulsively readable, Golden Hill has a plot that twists every chapter, and a puzzle at its heart that won't let go till the last paragraph of the last page.

Set a generation before the American Revolution, it paints an irresistible picture of a New York provokingly different from its later self: but subtly shadowed by the great city to come, and already entirely a place where a young man with a fast tongue can invent himself afresh, fall in love - and find a world of trouble."