by Mark Twain
First published 2020
Tom Canty makes his way through the cramped quarters where he lives, just steps from London Bridge. The ancient city stretches around him, its hundred thousand residents packed into timber houses that lean precariously over narrow, winding streets. Each building tells its own story through painted beams of red, blue, and black, their upper floors jutting out further than the ones below. Small diamond-paned windows catch what light they can in this maze of medieval architecture. Tom knows every crooked alley in his neighborhood, where the wooden structures crowd together and the streets stay perpetually dirty. This is London as it was fifteen centuries in the making, a great metropolis for its time, where the very buildings seem to elbow each other for space. In this world of timber and plaster, where houses grow broader as they climb skyward, Tom's story unfolds against the backdrop of a city both magnificent and squalid.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, adventure, 19th-century
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, mistaken-identity
Setting: London, London Bridge
Period: 15th Century
262 pages · Paperback · Independently published