The skies of Oxford are aflame with meteors the night Edgar Jones comes into the world–clearly this porter’s son, born in a small cottage in 1847, is no ordinary boy. While his mother is apprehensive about her restless, inquisitive child, Edgar’s father believes without a doubt that his son is destined for greatness. As the years pass, it becomes apparent that Edgar has a unique talent: He is a born inventor, and his gift for making is matched by a fierce will. Edgar turns his back on the scholarly life his father had intended for him and apprentices himself to a blacksmith. It is not long before his ingenuity and metalworking skills bring him to the attention of a maverick professor at Oxford University, a bone collector with plans for a museum of natural history. Finally, Edgar has the opportunity to showcase the singular gifts he’s learned in the hazardous soot and heat of the forge. But his great ability also becomes a curse, and his prominence is fraught with danger–both for him and for his family. Set at the dramatic midpoint of the nineteenth century, in a world on the cusp of change, The Ingenious Edgar Jones is an unforgettable coming-of-age story about the complexities of family life and the journey of one young man as he finds his place in a rapidly shifting world. *Starred Review* Misunderstood, misfit hero Edgar Jones, a boy who revels in invention, who literally wants to fly, whose very body marks him as strange, will grab your heart. Edgar’s personality rivals that of John Irving’s Owen Meany—a brilliant, odd little boy with a naive trust in human nature and a childish thirst for adventure that sets him apart from the staid Victorian world. Edgar’s inquisitiveness lands him in trouble with his masters: first the blacksmith; then the ironworkers; then his beloved professor, an inventor; and finally his own father. Like any inventor, Edgar must first learn to take things apart, and that’s what he does; but it’s what he creates and why he does it that make him so compelling. Garner uses Edgar’s character as a way of exploring the ideological revolution in Oxford during the early 1800s, as science battles religion for supremacy. Edgar’s parents find themselves trapped in this changing world, first encouraging their son’s ingenuity and boldness, then shocked by the outcome . The lovely cadence of Garner’s language and her careful attention to the physical world as a story mirror (“Edgar was flying over the skin of the world”) create an atmosphere of excitement and wonder—Edgar’s outlook on life as a reading experience. Heartbreaking, exhilarating, and unforgettable, Edgar’s rite of passage into adulthood is also a Darwinian portrait of a society in upheaval. --Jen Baker “Elizabeth Garner’s American debut is ingenuity itself, a winner. I love it.” —Gregory Maguire, bestselling author of Wicked and A Lion Among Men ELIZABETH GARNER was born in Cheshire, England, and now lives in Oxford. The Ingenious Edgar Jones is her American debut. 9780307408990
excerpt Gardner: THE INGENIOUS EDGAR JONES 1 Close to the Spine Oxford, 1847 The night that William Jones’s world changed began like any other. At six o’clock he rose from his bed, made his prayers and his ablutions. At quarter past six he took tea and toast with his wife, Eleanor, in their front parlor. And at half past six, to the beat of the bell of the grandfather clock, he buttoned up his coat, pulled his hat down upon his head, kissed his wife, and lifted the latch of his front door. The steady pace of his footsteps marked out the half-hour walk across Oxford. It was a cold February night. The sky was clear and pinpricked with stars. The moon was nothing but a splinter, the curl of a stray feather stuck to the velvet dark of the sky. William pulled up his collar and watched the mists of his breath rope through the air before him. He always loved the turning from the lanes of Jericho village out onto St Giles—the road that took him into the heart of the city. It was an invisible boundary between the quiet domestic world where he was a loving husband, and the University, where he was a watchman at the college gates. Every time he trod this path he would reflect how the change in the streets echoed the differences between his worlds. The roads of Jericho twisted in upon themselves, and a man could get easily lost. It was sometimes thus when he was sitting by the fireside with his wife. The conversation would ebb and flow between them, full of affection, and talk of the daughter that was blossoming in her belly. But there were times when there were shadowed corners in their speech, when a thing might not mean to Eleanor what it meant to him, and he would feel that he had taken a wrong turn down a dark alley, and was sitting in a room that seemed in outward appearance to be his home, but was not. Whereas when he emerged on the University streets, there stood the broad walls of the colleges, set shoulder to shoulder, their domes, spires,