Larger	Pinkerton's Sister Author: Peter Rushforth
	Book Information Publisher: Harcourt Book Type: Paperback Rating: 1 ISBN-13: 9780156031868 - ISBN-10: 0156031868 Publication Date: 5/1/2006 Pages: 736

A dazzling tour de force, twenty-five years in the writing, Pinkerton's Sister will be one of the most talked about novels of 2005.
It's turn of the century New York, a city bursting with new life as the old century's order makes way for the mercantile class. But in the Pinkerton household a nineteenth-century embarrassment remains: Alice Pinkerton.

Though her neighbors consider her a "madwoman in the attic," Alice's mind is razor sharp, honed by a restless imagination, years of reading, and a profound contempt for her surroundings. In the upstairs bedroom she calls her "classroom," Alice has devoured the world that brings her mind alive: Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Michelangelo, Whitman, Poe, they are her inspiration; Jane Eyre, Catherine Moreland, Desdemona her companions. As she moves through the witless world around her, observing its prejudices, its shallow culture and its vanity, it is society that prompts her observations, viewing all through the prism of the art that has sustained and nourished her lonely life.