This is an auction for THE WATERWORKS by E L Doctorow.

(This is the book on the right in the photograph. THE MARCH is in a separate auction.)

“Each novel by Doctorow is an entirely different experience, a journey of the imagination into hitherto uncharted territory. The Waterworks, set in the corrupt but exciting New York of the decade following the Civil War, is the strangest such journey yet. The narrator, an newspaperman named McIlvaine, recalls the events surrounding the disappearance of one of his paper's freelance writers in 1871. Martin Pemberton was the son of Augustus Pemberton, a brutal, cunning man who had made a fortune as a war profiteer, then died, leaving his family penniless. Martin was convinced he had seen his father alive, in a coach in the company of other old men; then Martin vanished. McIlvaine interests the municipal police, in the person of Captain Edmund Donne, and together they ferret out a scheme in which aging millionaires have paid the brilliant Dr Sartorius to preserve their lives in a state of suspended animation. The tale has the brightly lit intensity and surreality of a dream, heightened by McIlvaine's halting, amazed narration; and such is the power of Doctorow's imagination that New York itself seems to become an actor in the drama. Doctorow subdues his contemporary sensibility in favor of a wonderfully convincing 19th-century angle of vision. It is as if Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James had somehow combined their incompatible geniuses to bring this profoundly haunting fable to life.”

• Publishers Weekly (US)

Very favourable reviews on Amazon.com.

Paperback 1997.

264 pages.

Good condition.

The cost of shipping is $4.95.

There is of course no charge for shipping if you collect this book from my shop in Palmerston North following the auction.

Payment within seven days, please.