A Factory of Cunning

Set in late eighteenth-century England, Philippa Stockley's American debut gives us a wickedly delightful but deadly serious battle of the wills and the sexes. It begins with the arrival in London of the mysterious Mrs. Foxon the run from a scandalous French pastwho takes a new identity, determined to reinvent herself. She must pit her formidable skills for revenge against Earl Much, a British aristocrat with no less notorious a past and easily her match in sinfulness and intrigue. Between these two swirls a story featuring venal lords, wronged maidens, and reprobate clergymen, transporting readers from bawdy houses to country estatesplaces where the pleasures of the flesh are both high comedy and serious business. A Factory of Cunningtakes readers to the world immortalshy;ized in Dangerous Liaisons.And, like Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White,the vividly rendered setting and characters give the thrill of a fresh discovery.

Philippa Stockley is a deputy editor at the Evening Standard and also works as an artist and illustrator. She lives in London.