Pinkerton's Sister - Hardcover

Sometimes, a book comes along that demands attention, so considerable is its achievement. Peter Rushforth’s Pinkerton’s Sister has all the earmarks of being such a book, with the twenty-five years it took to write resulting in a novel that his publishers (for once) are fully justified in calling a ‘tour de force’. This is a sprawling, ambitious, richly detailed piece of work that recalls Joyce's Ulysses in its panoramic picture of a whole society, presented through a series of sharply observed mini-portraits (although Rushforth is more immediately accessible than his great predecessor).

Set in turn-of-the-century New York, Rushforth’s subject is the Pinkerton family, still yoked in pre-Twentieth Century ways. Alice Pinkerton is treated with care and indulgence by her family as she is ’special’; somewhere on the fringes (as her family perceives it) of sanity, and taken out to social events but always nervously observed. Alice has her own world, constructed out of the books she loves --and this literary conceit is the engine of Rushforth’s remarkable book. Alice has enriched her mind with the gothic menace of Jane Eyre and the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, the wit of Oscar Wilde, the glorious poetry of Shakespeare, the insights of Walt Whitman. With laser-like penetration, she cast a cool eye on the follies of the world around her, her observations honed by the great work of literature that are her inspiration.

Over two decades ago Peter Rushforth published his first book, the much-acclaimed Kindergarten, and that small masterpiece has lacked a companion for many years. The wait was well worthwhile: Pinkerton’s Sister may be an arm-straining volume at 729 pages, but amply rewards the patient reader’s close attention. --Barry Forshaw

For Alice Pinkerton, trapped in a suffocating life of convention and party chatter, 1903 New York Society is enough to make a woman mad?or at least a madwoman in the attic. So Alice escapes through the looking glass of literature, finding companionship and inspiration in Shakespeare, Wilde, Hawthorne, Stevenson, Poe, Austen, and the rest of the literary pantheon of her day. Like a character from one of her favorite novels, Alice holds a biting, eccentric, but expansive view of life, and through it all provides a tremendous portrait of her society?at once heartbreaking and wildly funny, intelligent and dazzling in its range.
Pinkerton's Sister is a true celebration of the imagination and a mesmerizing example of the saving power of fiction. Most of all, it is the quintessential novel for readers.

"Something of a cross between Harriet the Spy and Jane Eyre? Rushforth weaves Alice's often fastastical musings together with bits of the classics, popular novels, doggerel, and even advertisements for dentures and corsets. An epic inquiry into literature's role as an engine of interior life." -- The New Yorker

"Ambitious, intricate, moving." -- A.S. Byatt

"A gorgeous conundrum, the result of a lifetime of close reading-- and some 25 years of close writing." -- San Francisco Chronicle

"Pinkerton's Sister is a work of rare beauty and (rarer still!) genuine wit." -- The Believer
Peter Rushforth is also the author of KINDERGARTEN, which was published to much acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. A schoolteacher, he lived in North Yorkshire, England.