Discount Price: $7.99
Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780345422521
ISBN number: 034542252X
Label: Ballantine Books
Manufacturer: Ballantine Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 416
Printing Date: February 01, 2000
Publishing house: Ballantine Books
Release Date: February 01, 2000
Sale Popularity Level: 214819
Studio: Ballantine Books
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
The year is 1872. The place is Wigan, England, a coal town where rich mine owners live lavishly alongside miners no better than slaves. Into this dark, complicated world comes Jonathan Blair, who has accepted a commission to find a missing man.
When he begins his search every road leads back to one woman, a haughty, vixenish pit girl named Rose. With her fiery hair and skirts pinned up over trousers, she cares nothing for a society that calls her unnatural, scandalous, erotic.
As Rose and Blair circle one another, very first warily, then with the heat of mutual desire, Blair loses his balance. And the lull induced by Rose's sensual touch leaves him unprepared for the bizarre, soul-scorching truth. . . .
Amazon.com Review:
For Jonathon Blair, a mining engineer and explorer, the colour and rigors of the Dark Continent are far more suitable than the foggy drizzle of his home in Wigan, Lancashire. When he returns from Africa's Gold Coast in 1872, he finds England utterly depressing and turns to drink to ease his melancholy. His patron, a Bishop and mine owner, agrees to send him back if he can clear up the mysterious disappearance of a local curate engaged to marry his daughter. As he sleuths around the cultured homes of Wigan, through ill-cobbled alleys and into the depths of the mines, he meets the alluring Rose Malyneaux. Used to relying on himself, Blair finds that Rose's instincts provide more answers than he could have hoped for.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
"Rose" is a novel that without question, I would never have seen or heard of without Amazon's listamania system. But as it happened, someone liked this book and listed it and made it sound interesting enough for me to read it.
Blaire is a mining engineer desperate-for person reasons-to get back to the gold coast of Africa, which, although he was born English and raised American is as much his home as anywhere. But with no money and no good reputation he is at the mercy of the Bishop Hannay who will fiancé Blaire's return if-and only if-he will return to the town of Wigan (where he and the Bishop share a birthplace if nothing of the same history) and find Hannay's daughter's missing fiancé, who was the towns curate, John Maypole.
Blaire isn't a happy but he takes the gig, only to find a town of coal blackened and unfriendly miners who seem to have no interest in finding the missing reverend-a sentiment his fiancée Charlotte seems to share. Quickly building enemies with miners and local nobility and at the same time a strange and poignant relationship with Rose, a pit girl who according Maypole's cryptic and coded journal seems to be at the center of the mystery, Blaire finds that the deeper he digs into the mess, the more likely he is to be the one missing.
This isn't the kind of novel I would have gotten into normally but thanks to the recommendation I did read it. While I can't say the very first half was especially engaging (I had to keep returning to previous pages to recheck names and facts) the second picked up a bit and the ending was really pretty great. Maybe if I had more familiarity with the author I would have enjoyed it more because there was nothing with the plot, only the execution, which was as dim as the coal dust covered skies above Wigan.
But if you like mysteries this is a good one, even if it is a bit slow.
Three stars.
And if you're looking for something else about coal mining, I suggest A Place Called Freedomby Ken Follett, the very first half of which has a lot to do with Scottish coal pits.
Rated by buyers 
-
Rose is one of the most evocative, beautifully written historical novels I've ever read. Smith picks you up and puts you down in a Victorian-era mining village where you can feel the coal dust in the air, as well as an undercurrent of danger. His descriptions are palpable and very sensuous, and you really crawl into the skin of his protagonist.
I give this five stars despite a major "Say what???" moment during the resolution, alluded to by some other reviewers. Yes, the plot turns in a completely unbelievable direction. It's a testament to Mr. Smith's writing that I still think of this novel as absolutely exquisite. It's the kind of book you find yourself picking up and opening at random every once in a while, just for the pleasure of returning to the world he created.
Rated by buyers 
-
What a tedious slog through rainy, dim Wigan. Many years ago I had the pleasure of listening to Martin Cruz Smith discuss how Gorky Park, his most recent book, was fertilized by his reading about how faces could be reconstructed from bones and muscles. He liked the idea and wanted to write a book around that thought. He did, and a compelling book and fascinating book was eventually born. I've read several others of his, and enjoyed them all. This one has been on my shelf for a number of years before I dusted it off and plowed in. Oh, how much better if it had remained upright.
I cannot for the life of me understand all the 4 and 5 star reviews. As a sociological study of a coal mining town, it is interesting. I've read many books about this time, and this certainly added to my knowledge. But as a novel...sheesh! I'd guess the spark for this book was Smith's reading of a 19th Century memoir of a pit girl's life. He then researched extensively, and managed to write a story without leaving out any of the innumerable tidbits he learned. Details pile up like a 100 car crash, heaped and splattered in that annoying manner so common in historical novels. No one writing a contemporary tale would include these details, as they would be extraneous, self-evident, and slow the action. But here, in a foreign world, we need to be told just how much reading the author did. And the characters seem mighty modern. No overt anachronisms, but speech and attitudes that sound way too current for the setting. So we learn a lot about 19th Century coal mining, and the lives of miners, but the tale itself gets repeatedly stuck.
Or so I thought. Clearly, many folks believe otherwise. But this started unconvincingly, and never improved.
Rated by buyers -
Disclaimer: it's been many years since I read this book. But I still recall it as a vividly painted, unpredictable love story/mystery that was very satisfying. I've also read Polar Star and Gorky Park: both wonderful, detailed, rich, as well. But I liked this one more. I concur with the reviews that call some of the plot twists a tad too fantastic, but I was willing to go along for the ride. For one thing, the love story is juicy, naughty, teasing -- delicious. I suppose this is a chick flick of a novel, and yet many of the details were shockingly grotesque and violent. Anyway, give it a try. If it's too slow for you, try an Arkady Renko book instead. Or, just let it sink into you and enjoy it!
Rated by buyers 
-
A complete change of focus from the gritty Arkady Renko mysteries set in Russia, this Martin Cruz Smith novel takes place in Wigam, a mining village in Victorian England. Jonathan Blair, formerly of Wigam but more recently of Africa, has been charged by the local bishop with the task of finding John Maypole, the curate to whom the bishop's daughter Charlotte is engaged. Blair is anxious to return to Africa, a place he'd found so comfortable in comparison to the staid and class-conscious place of his birth, that he'd been accused by others of having "gone native." The bishop will send him back to Africa only if he can find Maypole.
Though the setting and time are completely different from Cruz Smith's more familiar Russian novels, his sense of place and his ability to create vibrant settings, rich with details, are in full play here. The terrible contrasts between the rich landowners and the poor miners and the belief that this is the way God has intended the world to be create a bleak picture of life and a brooding sense of misery throughout the novel. The lives of the women, both rich and poor, examined in detail, are shown to be at least as miserable as those of the men.
As Blair conducts the search for Maypole, the author takes us into the mines, shows us how they are constructed, the dangers they pose, the methods the miners use to avoid methane explosions, the horrific working conditions, the cruelty of the most powerful pit workers toward the weaker, and the acceptance of these conditions by the mine owners, in this case, the bishop. Blair becomes acquainted with a pit boss who "teaches" him a local "game," in which miners wearing nail-studded clogs fight each other in a deadly combination of wrestling and boxing, and he befriends the mysterious Rose, a pit girl who, surprisingly, has books at her place of residence. The fact that she is also the girlfriend of the most powerful pit boss adds to the complexities of the action.
The conditions and motivations of the characters are fully revealed within the brutal social conditions of the day, as the mystery develops. Blair, thought "anonymous," to some extent, because he is not part of any of the social systems in Wigam, learns more than he wants to know about its way of life and its people. (In its gorier details, the reader, too, may learn more than s/he wants to know.) Intensely involving and grimly depicted, and filled with elements of social conscience and even romance, this novel is the equal of the Renko novels with which Cruz Smith readers may be more familiar. n Mary Whipple
Stalin's Ghost: An Arkady Renko Novel (Arkady Renko Novels)
Red Square
Havana Bay
December 6: A Novel
Find other books like this one:
