Published February 2005!

The Great Stink book cover
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Beautifully written, evocative and compelling and with a fantastically vivid cast of characters, Clare Clark's first book is a rich and suspenseful novel that draws the reader right into Victorian London and into the worlds of its characters desperately attempting to swim the tides of change.

A Viking book. Published by the Penguin Group.

The Great Stink

A novel by Clare Clark

It is 1855 and William May has returned to London from the battlefields of the Crimea, devastated by the horrors he has suffered at the front line.

Back home with his wife and young son, disoriented by the chaos and clamour of the relentless burgeoning city, May tries to rebuild his shattered life. When he secures a job working with Bazalgette to transform the city's sewer system, he believes it will prove his salvation and, in the filthy maze of old tunnels, May begins to lay his ghosts to rest.

But this subterranean world hides its own terrible secrets and when a violent murder is committed, a parallel world unfolds beneath London's streets that will bring William ever closer to the edge of his own destruction.

The Great Stink book coverOfficial Launch party,
Daunt's Books March 1st
6:30pm - 8:30pm,
83 Marylebone High Street,
London W1U 4QW

Publishing News
Not since Patrick Suskind wrote Perfume has a novelist so effectively made a story reek with atmosphere

Margaret Forster
Staggeringly evocative, a fine new novelist

Time Out Critics Choice of 5 books for 2005 (Jan 5-12th)
2005's Sarah Waters? A gothic thriller set in – or rather underneath – London in 1855. Draw the curtains, light the fire, unplug the phone, etc.

Simon Sebag-Montefiore
Gothic, evocative, deeply researched and thoroughly enjoyable, The Great Stink oozes with the stench of humanity and the secret history of subterranean Victorian London