Pinkerton's Sister

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. Alice isn't mad exactly, but she's not sane either. She is tolerated, free to wander about, free to accompany her family to tea parties - free to be treated like a simpleton. But in truth Alice's mind is razor sharp, honed by a restless imagination, years of reading and a profound contempt for her surroundings. Left alone to read, to think, she 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.

'Rushforth constructs Alice's allusive, punning, mordant train of thought wtih the precision of a watchmaker. The result is an enormously ambitious book that requires, but repays, both concentration and stamina' THE DAILIY TELEGRAPH
'A wonderfully weird and enjoyable novel of 752 pages; take your time and be rewarded. In turn-of-the-century New York a clever young woman escapes from grim reality, identifying herself with the mad woman in the attic of literature. Funny and original, disturbing beneath its witty surface' Lee Langley, Books of the Year, THE SPECTATOR
'Alice is a brilliant creation, so magnificently ferocious, so scathingly sarcastic, so troubled, so helpless, so clever and so bitingly witty...a hugely impressive achievement...I am quite awed by it'
MARGARET FORSTER
"A magnificent achievement. It is a huge, ambitious story which unfolds at a leisurely pace as the heroine remembers and assesses her life from the vantage point of a single day... Alice's sad life story makes a subtle, polished novel, a monument to Peter Rushforth's perseverance and well worth the long wait"
Sunday Telegraph 29/8
'The prose is as light as thistledown and gives you that priceless impression of being read to, rather than having to expend any effort in reading... Rushforth perfectly captures Alice's knowing madness. He lets the reader inside the soul of this woman just as Colm Toibin, in his shortlisted Booker front runner, The Master, takes the reader into the world of that other wise virgin, Henry James'
Daily Express 8/10
From the very first paragraph of this richly textured, highly literary and musical novel - I found myself absorbed into a bizarre and unsettling world, utterly unlike anything I have read. .. A disturbing, brilliant and rewarding read' INDEPENDENT
'As an account of the growth of a mind it is quite exceptional, a fine rendering of the confusions and flippancies, the idiocies, the desires and disgusts and self-loathings that a life of reading can produce...a book as enthralling and as curious in its many extraordinary jaunts as, say, Tess memorably walking through the fields with the cuckoo-spittle on her skirt, crunching the snails underfoot' GUARDIAN
'A tale tha trustles with echoes of other texts -- the story of a brilliant and troubled woman in 19th-century New York. Well worth the required reading' A S Byatt, NEW STATESMAN
'A huge complicated cobweb of Gothic writing, set in late nineteenth century New York, and reminiscent of Marguerite Young's unmanageable masterpiece, MISS MACINTOSH, MY DARLING. Its moustached and too-clever narrator describes herself as a madwoman in an attic. The story she tells is terrible and occluded but ultimately unforgettable' A S Byatt, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Praise for Peter Rushforth and KINDERGARTEN
'Woven together like a piece of music...A brilliant book...an extraordinary mixture of different kinds and levels of narrative' AS BYATT
'A very impressive first novel...and one by which I have been both moved and excited...It offers such an experience that my own response on finishing it was to turn back to the beginning and immediately start again...It is told with remarkable and individual artistry...It makes the heart ache' LITERARY REVIEW
'A miraculously cleverly constructed book...remarkably reading and entertaining' IRISH TIMES
'Original and compelling...accomplished with fine moral judgement and narrative skill' NEW STATESMAN
'A remarkable first novel with profound emotional impact' PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
'Masterly...a powerful affirmation of civilization and culture and the creative force of the family in the face of anarchy and death' Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, THE NEW YORK TIMES
'Quite extraordinary...has the intense, deeply focused power of a cultural meditation, on certain themes of suffering, of childhood and family, triumphant in this almost unbearable world' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
'He writes with a subtle sense of structure, his style has charm without being cloyingly picturesque, and he covers the stuff of new headlines with an artistic control that lifts KINDERGARTEN distinctly above the typical well-crafted documentary novel' WASHINGTON POST
'This extraordinary novel, 25 years in the making, explores the consolations and possible deformations of literature. It's richly, almost hallucinogenically, referenced, and Alice's cloistered imagination is luridly present' GUARDIAN 3/9
'Rushforth constructs Alice's allusive, punning, mordant train of thought with the precision of a watchmaker. The result is an enormously ambitious book that requires, but repays, both concentration and stamina' DAILY TELEGRAPH
'In fact, Alice has a lively imagination, stoked by voracious reading, and she sits in witty and merciless judgement on the world. The mapping of Alice's inner geography is impressive, as is Rushforth's erudition' MAIL ON SUNDAY