The Maze at Windermere: A Novel

Description

“Staggeringly brilliant….. [and] extraordinary. You’ll start The Maze of Windermere with bewilderment, but you’ll close it in awe.” -- The Washington Post

“Pitch perfect… The different strands of the narrative are skillfully braided.” -- New York Times Book Review

Gregory Blake Smith’s spellbinding tale of five intersecting worlds weaves a brilliant tapestry of ambition and desire, charting a voyage into the maze of the human heart.

 
A reckless wager between a tennis pro with a fading career and a drunken party guest—the stakes are an antique motorcycle and an heiress’s diamond necklace—launches an odyssey that braids together three centuries of love and ambition, aspiration and adversity. A witty and urbane bachelor of the Gilded Age embarks on a high-risk scheme to marry into a fortune;  the  young writer Henry James, soon to make his mark on the world, turns himself to his craft with harrowing social consequences; an aristocratic British officer during the American Revolution carries on a courtship that leads to murder; and, in Newport’s earliest days, a tragically orphaned Quaker girl imagines a way forward for herself and the slave girl she has inherited.
 
In The Maze at Windermere Gregory Blake Smith weaves these intersecting worlds into a brilliant tapestry, charting a voyage across the ages into the maze of the human heart.