a novel of Edgar Allan Poe
An orphaned young woman in antebellum Maryland is pulled into a maelstrom of passion, pain, and occult power in this Gothic homage to the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe.
”I died a fortnight ago this coming Thursday. It was a terrifically unpleasant experience—being murdered, I mean to say.”
Raven Helen Allan has always been haunted by witchcraft. Since the death of her beloved mother, she has soothed herself by speaking words into spells—a proclivity enhanced by time spent with her aunt’s library of occult books. She also finds a self-destructive solace in transmuting the pain in her heart onto her flesh.
After an itinerant childhood spent first with her mother’s traveling theater troupe and then being passed around from relative to relative, Raven is relieved to finally settle down with Aunt Berenice in her Baltimore townhouse—even if her aunt spends most evenings in a laudanum haze. There she finds a long-sought sense of belonging with the family of enslaved workers in her aunt’s household, especially the brilliantly odd youngest daughter Pym. Raven’s infatuation with her friend only grows more intimate as the girls become women together. But when the household is threatened with financial ruin, Raven must set out to earn her own living.
Taking a job as a paid companion, Raven arrives at the crumbling Moldavia Manor. Her charge is a delicate young invalid named Lenore Legrand who haunts the Gothic structure like a phantom. Living with them is Lenore’s devoted older cousin Travanion, who shares Raven’s interest in the occult and devotes his days to searching ancient texts for an Elixir of Life that might cure his cousin. Raven finds herself inexorably drawn to both cousins as well as to the secrets hidden in the shadows of Moldavia Manor. Will she find the answers she seeks in Trevanion’s alchemical texts? What is the meaning of glowing green light emitted from the tower windows? And is Raven truly narrating this story from beyond the grave—if so, who murdered her?
Gothic and atmospheric, Raven is an aching tale of loss, freedom, death, and resurrection by the celebrated author of Jane Steele and Dust and Shadow.
“Lyndsay Faye is the kind of gifted storyteller who hooks you from the first line and never lets go. This darkly witty, superbly orchestrated novel is both a cunning repurposing of the Poe universe and a delicious fever dream all its own. May Faye be entertaining us evermore.” —Louis Bayard, Edgar and Dagger Award-nominated author of The Pale Blue Eye
“Nobody writes like Lyndsay Faye, but nobody: I mean it. I'll fight you round back. I've never known another writer with the ability to render in such crystalline, unnerving precision the voices of the past. If you thought The Gods of Gotham was good, get ready for your new favourite. Poe is a wildly difficult writer to mimic, never mind to play upon, but watching Faye do it is like watching an acrobat at a dark circus, complete with raven angel wings. It's weird, it's masterful, and it's bloody annoying. How dare she write this well?” —Natasha Pulley, international bestselling author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and The Kingdoms
“Faye has created a lush tome born of Poe that lives into its own unique being; RAVEN deftly weaves bits of truth and swaths of fiction into a captivating Gothic tapestry that looks like a stormy sky and feels like a fever-dream you hope to linger in, for as long as it’s safe to do so…” —Leanna Renee Hieber, USA Today bestselling author of America’s Most Gothic and Strangely Beautiful
“utterly winning…Faye is an author of first-rate historical fiction… [She] writes a good puzzle, and more important, she has the dash of a real writer—which is not to say simply a published writer, but a person meant to write, who thinks and jokes and understands by writing. It’s a rare gift.” —the New York Times Book Review
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ALSO BY LYNDSAY FAYE: THE EDGAR AWARD-NOMINATED AND INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING TIMOTHY WILDE TRILOGY
One of Publishers Weekly's Top Ten Mystery/Thrillers of the Year
One of Kirkus Reviews' Ten Best Crime Novels of the Year
One of Gillian Flynn's "Recommendations for the Season" on Today
Edgar(R) Award Nominee for Best Novel
ALA Reading List Award for Best Mystery
1845: New York City forms its first police force. The great potato famine hits Ireland. These two events will change New York City forever….
Timothy Wilde tends bar, saving every dollar in hopes of winning the girl of his dreams. But when his dreams are destroyed by a fire that devastates downtown Manhattan, he is left with little choice but to accept a job in the newly minted New York City Police Department.
Returning exhausted from his rounds one night, Tim collides with a girl no more than ten years old… covered in blood. She claims that dozens of bodies are buried in the forest north of Twenty-Third Street. Timothy isn’t sure whether to believe her, but as the image of a brutal killer is slowly revealed and anti-Irish rage infects the city, the reluctant copper star is engaged in a battle that may cost him everything…
One of The Wall Street Journal’s Ten Best Mysteries of the Year
“Amazing...This is a series for the ages, it’s so spectacular.”—Gillian Flynn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Gone Girl
1846: In New York City, slave catching isn’t just legal—it’s law enforcement.
Six months after the formation of the NYPD, its most reluctant and talented officer, Timothy Wilde, learns of the gruesome underworld of lies and corruption ruled by the “blackbirders,” who snatch free Northerners of color from their homes, masquerade them as slaves, and sell them South to toil as plantation property.
When the beautiful and terrified Lucy Adams staggers into Timothy’s office to report a robbery and is asked what was stolen, her reply is, “My family.” Their search for her mixed-race sister and son will plunge Timothy and his feral brother, Valentine, into a world where police are complicit and politics savage, and where corpses appear in the most shocking of places…
The final installment in Lyndsay Faye’s Timothy Wilde series, which Lee Child called “solid-gold” and is published in 15 languages. Heralded by The New York Times Book Review as a "rollicking historical novel" and "a sensational account of what early police work was like."
No one in 1840s New York likes fires, copper star Timothy Wilde least of all. After a blaze killed his parents and another left him with a terrible scar, he has avoided flames of all kinds. So when a seamstress turned arsonist threatens Robert Symmes, a corrupt tycoon high in the Tammany Hall ranks, Timothy isn’t thrilled that Symmes consults him.
His dismay escalates when his audacious and charismatic older brother, Valentine, himself deeply politically entrenched, decides to run against the incumbent, who they suspect is guilty of assault and far darker crimes. Immediately after his brother’s courageous declaration, Timothy finds himself surrounded by powerful enemies.
Meanwhile, the love of Timothy’s life, Mercy Underhill, takes under her wing a starving Irish orphan who may be the key to stopping the combustions threatening the city—if only they can make sense of her cryptic accounts. The closer they come to deciphering her wild tales of witches and angels, however, the closer Timothy comes to the fiery and shocking conclusion that forces him to face everything he fears most.
