About the Author:
Melvyn Bragg is a writer and broadcaster. His novels include The Hired Man, for which he won the Time/Life Silver Pen Award, Without a City Wall, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, The Soldier's Return, winner of the WHSmith Literary Award, A Son of War and Crossing the Lines, both of which were longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, A Place in England, which was longlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize, and most recently Grace and Mary. He has also written several works of non-fiction, including The Book of Books about the King James Bible. He lives in London and Cumbria.
From Publishers Weekly:
Bragg, the author of 15 previous books, has here combined fact and fiction to produce a remarkable tour-de-force, a penetrating psychological novel based on an actual court case of 1802. John Hatfield, ex-convict, forger and bigamist, decides to improve his fortune by impersonating Colonel Alexander Augustus Hope, a member of Parliament and brother of the Earl of Hopetoun. He sets out in a methodical fashion to seduce a young heiress and elope with her, thereby laying claim to her fortune. But while courting his intended victim in the Lake District, Hatfield falls in love with Mary Robinson, a local beauty, and marries her. Exposed as an imposter by a suspicious colonel, Hatfield flees. The Bow Street Runners are sent after him and the chase is on. Hatfield-Hope is gradually revealed as a man who is at once a pathological liar, a religious mystic and a philanderer with a huge sexual appetite, whose unflagging devotion to "his Mary" is oddly touching.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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