When [the door] opened, and Geertje Van Loon wide in bright silks stood there, with Flora and Anne crowding behind her to see, a myriad of little flames spangling the dark hall, it looked as if a treasure-house had opened, a winter cavern set with jewels, and an air laden with spices flowed out.
First published in 2016, Golden Hill has been at the back of my mind ever since, one of those books that you don’t quite leap to buy or borrow when you see it but have a vague intention of reading. It was the sort of book that I might choose to make up a ‘buy one get one free’ offer. Then just before Christmas I was ordering some books as presents and I saw this and just on the spur of the moment bought it. And now I have read it and if you’ve heard that it is amazing, well then you heard aright.
The basic plot is this: in 1746 a charming Englishman disembarks in New York and hurries straight to a counting-house in Golden Hill Street where he presents an order to cash a thousand pounds – an unimaginably large sum which will put the merchant, Mr Lovell, to great trouble to realise. Suspicious, Mr Lovell strikes a bargain with Mr Smith: if the corroborating documents, which have not yet arrived, reach New York in the next sixty days, Smith shall have his money; if not, he’ll take him to court.
Mr Smith agrees, establishes himself in lodgings, almost immediately has all his cash stolen, and waits. Of course, he is not what he seems to be. But what does he seem to be?
What I loved most of all about this novel was the way that the story was told, in language inflected with the eighteenth century but not weighed down by it. His sentences are often long and rich, but supple and vivid. His characters are pleasingly complex. Although I don’t usually care about spoilers, I am not going to give anything away about the plot because part of the book’s charm is its unexpectedness and its feeling of anything being possible. Also, the ending flips everything on its head and you realise that, like Smith, Golden Hill wasn’t what you thought it was about at all. It may seem to be about the solid centre of New York society but in fact it was about the margins all along. More I shall not write, particularly as I have to rush out into the garden and plant some bulbs now, but I do urge you to read it if you like clever and entertaining novels of great charm (and bonus: it’s also educational! I learnt a lot about American currency in the eighteenth century that I hadn’t known I hadn’t known).