The Dress Lodger - Softcover

Sheri Holman vividly and convincingly conjures a fully-textured fictive past peopled with strange and true characters - Charles Frazier I found it a riveting read, thoroughly enjoyable. From the first page I felt confident that I was in the hands of a real writer with an individual voice - literate, witty, intelligent, thoughtful - Kate Atkinson Sheri Holman writes with extraordinary assurance and style - Miranda Seymour Dickensian, in the best sense . . . tremendous, confident pace is matched by a knowledge of the period and its concerns - Margaret Forster Sheri Holman s prose, tart, racy and sombre, will sing in your soul a long while - Frank McCourt It shows a confidence and sophistication expected from a more mature, experienced writer, with a real feel for detail - The Herald - Glasgow An impressive and crackling authenticity to her work. The smells, sounds and hideous sights of the time and place are convincingly reproduced with confidence and literary poise 'Creepily atmospheric novel - Independent

Sunderland in 1832 is in the grip of a cholera epidemic, but life goes on relentlessly around it. Gustine, a sixteen-year-old prostitute who rents her beautiful blue dress from her pimp, is as busy as ever trying to earn a living to keep her baby fed. Her baby was born with its heart on the outside of its body, so when Gustine meets a doctor whose specialty is anatomy she resolves to help him find dead bodies to practise on, if he will in return help her...