Confessions of the Fox

A New Yorker Book of the Year, 2018
A Huffington Post Book of the Year, 2018
A Buzzfeed Book of the Year, 2018

'Quite simply extraordinary... Imagine if Maggie Nelson, Daphne du Maurier and Daniel Defoe collaborated.' Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent

Jack Sheppard - a transgender carpenter's apprentice - has fled his master's house to become a notorious prison break artist, and Bess Khan has escaped the draining of the fenlands to become a revolutionary mastermind. Together, they find themselves at the center of a web of corruption leading back to the dreaded Thief-Catcher General ...

...Or so we are told in a mysterious manuscript unearthed by one Professor R. Voth. Voth traces the origins and authenticity of the manuscript as Jack and Bess trace the connections between the bowels of Newgate Prison and the dissection chambers of the Royal College, in a bawdy collision of a novel about gender, love, and liberation.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE

Genre: Historical

"A triumphant debut . . . Adventure and erudition meet with a loose-limbed poetry in every sentence, and the result is a magician's trick of a novel but on a grand scale." - Alexander Chee

"With adventure, wit, and a ferocious heart, Confessions of the Fox is an astonishing, bawdy, dazzling triumph of a book." - Kelly Link

"Extraordinary and brilliant . . . At once a queer love story, radical counterhistory, and a thrilling page-turner, Confessions of the Fox is a vitally important work of our time." - China Miéville

"I devoured this book because of its Dickensian devotion to gnarly historical steam punk realism. Really it's such an obsessive read, sad it was over. I couldn't stop wanting to go there." - Eileen Myles

"Confessions of the Fox is quite simply extraordinary. Imagine if Maggie Nelson, Daphne du Maurier, and Daniel Defoe collaborated? That." - Sarah Perry

"A genre-bending, high-octane thrill from beginning to end . . . I couldn't put it down." - Lidia Yuknavitch