| Vendor | |
|---|---|
|
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik |
| Original language | |
| English | |
BEEFEATERS
Lucknow, India, 1885: a generation after the deadly Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, during a time when cultural fault lines still run through a city eternally on the brink of self-destruction.
The murder of a sacred bull and the public gunning down of an innocent man by a British police officer inspire a city-wide labor strike and incite protests and riots in Lucknow; the subsequent disappearance of a young white girlthe police inspector's daughtersets the British community further on edge. At the center of this chaos is the mysterious, seductive Harlan Coates, who might be responsible for the bull's death.
The story is told from a variety of perspectives: Malik Bahar, an ambitious legal clerk who is hiding something; Edwin Rutherford, Malik's employer, who has his own secrets; Ramona, a maid who becomes increasingly radicalized against her British colonizers; Ann, a proper young Englishwoman who secretly writes anti-colonial tracts; and Svaha, the wife of the slain man, a reluctant figurehead for a brewing rebellion.
A radical literary mystery in the vein of Sarah Waters's Fingersmith and Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries, Beefeaters gives fresh, compelling voice to a multiplicity of perspectives and illuminates the aftershocks of cultural trauma within a divided community.
Rachel Cochran is a Ph.D. candidate in the Creative Writing and 19th Century Studies programs at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Deep South Magazine, Glassworks, Literary Orphans, and elsewhere. She has won the Margaret McKinney, George Mahan, and Virginia Grabill awards in fiction, the Masters Review Short Story Award for New Writers, and the New Ohio Review nonfiction contest. She currently serves as Assistant Director of Creative Writing at UNL.
The story is told from a variety of perspectives: Malik Bahar, an ambitious legal clerk who is hiding something; Edwin Rutherford, Malik's employer, who has his own secrets; Ramona, a maid who becomes increasingly radicalized against her British colonizers; Ann, a proper young Englishwoman who secretly writes anti-colonial tracts; and Svaha, the wife of the slain man, a reluctant figurehead for a brewing rebellion.
A radical literary mystery in the vein of Sarah Waters's Fingersmith and Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries, Beefeaters gives fresh, compelling voice to a multiplicity of perspectives and illuminates the aftershocks of cultural trauma within a divided community.
Rachel Cochran is a Ph.D. candidate in the Creative Writing and 19th Century Studies programs at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Deep South Magazine, Glassworks, Literary Orphans, and elsewhere. She has won the Margaret McKinney, George Mahan, and Virginia Grabill awards in fiction, the Masters Review Short Story Award for New Writers, and the New Ohio Review nonfiction contest. She currently serves as Assistant Director of Creative Writing at UNL.