AS READ ON BBC RADIO 4
A SPECTATOR BEST OF THE YEAR - AS CHOSEN BY REVIEWERS

The year is 1742. Goody Brown, saved from drowning and adopted when just a babe, has grown up happily in the smuggling town of Winchelsea. Then, when Goody turns sixteen, her father is murdered in the night by men he thought were friends.

To find justice in a lawless land, Goody must enter the cut-throat world of her father's killers. With her beloved brother Francis, she joins a rival gang of smugglers. Facing high seas and desperate villains, she also discovers something else: an existence without constraints or expectations, a taste for danger that makes her blood run fast.

Goody was never born to be a gentlewoman. But what will she become instead?

Winchelsea is an electrifying story of vengeance and transformation; a rare, lyrical and transporting work of historical imagination that makes the past so real we can touch it.

"Boisterous . . . evocative . . . What holds the novel together as much as its driving plot are its incantatory atmosphere and spellbinding language" - * Guardian *

"Preston is a gifted prose cartographer, conjuring up the Sussex coastline in a crisp, clear fashion . . . He has written a bawdy, thunderous romp that echoes with cannon fire, sea shanties and the occasional plaintive cry of a nightjar" - * Financial Times *

"Glorious" - * Spectator *

"[A] spellbinding read, both gory and gorgeous" - * Daily Mail *

"Truly epic . . . The richness and enthusiasm of the prose speaks of a novelist who loves the process of spinning an unpredictable, fabulist yarn" - * i *

"A rip-roaring yarn about smugglers and seafarers in Romney Marsh and its coastal hinterland in the 18th century. The energy, word play and attention to contemporary detail could not be bettered" - * Spectator *