A Devil's Dozen (English Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

About the Book Violence, love, loyalty and betrayal among the smugglers who terrorise the coasts of southern England. For years the Aldington Blues and the Burmarsh Gang have fought each other over the lucrative smuggling trade in Kent. The rivalry was bitter and the stakes were high. Now the feud between the two smuggler leaders, George Ransley and James Hogben, is played out in deadly earnest. While their men grow rich, fall in love or gamble away their loot, the intense struggle between Ransley and Hogben follows a twisted route through bloodshed, treachery and wealth. But times are changing and the spectre of the gallows hangs over them all when a popular naval officer is killed by a smuggler. As the government men close in, the gangs join forces. But will it be enough to stave off defeat, capture and death? Meticulously researched and based on contemporary court papers and other records, “A Devil’s Dozen”recreates the vanished world of the smugglers who were once the kings of the British underworld.READING GUIDE* The book deals with real people and events in a fictional narrative. What did you make of this? Did you want to know what was real and what was fictional? Would you have been disappointed to find that it wasn’t true?* The book contains a large cast of characters, most of them male. How did you react to this? How would including more about their relationships outside the gang have changed the novel, compared with the internal focus it has now?* The book is set in a specific place. What role did the location play in the story? Would it have made a significant difference if the story had been set elsewhere? How well did you feel you knew the area and its people by the end? What did you think of local attitudes to smuggling?* The book is set in a specific period. How did this affect what happened to the characters? In what ways was life different then? In what ways was it the same? Do you think that most people were better or worse off? Financially? Socially?* The book has recurring themes of friendship and family, often in a positive context but sometimes less so. Misplaced loyalties and unwanted children cause problems in various ways. Was this blend of good and bad familiar to you? If so, how did it reflect your own experience?* The book uses a homosexual relationship within the gang to explore the contemporary scene. How plausible did you find the possibility of such a relationship? How much did you know about the ‘molly’ subculture of the 18th and early 19th centuries?* The book ends with the smugglers’ arrival in Tasmania. The author’s notes include biographical notes about each character’s later life in the colony. Did you find this interesting? Were you surprised by any of the details, in the light of the characterisations within the book?ABOUT THE AUTHORMarian Newell became a technical author in 1986 and started her own writing business with her partner in 1998, through which she covers a wide range of subjects from horticulture to software. Having grown up in the Weald of Kent, she has many childhood memories of the Cinque Ports and their lurid smuggling folklore. She first encountered the Aldington Gang, known as the Blues, while researching her family history. Her great-great-grandfather was a Ransley who emigrated to Canada and disappeared mysteriously, into the stomach of a bear or the arms of another woman according to rumour.Finding the story of the Blues more thrilling than her ancestry, Marian set out to imagine the drama around events in Aldington in the 1820s. There was plenty of source material, from local historian John Douch’s books of the 1980s to official records, witness statements, newspaper reports and personal journals of the day. Her novel tells the story of the central thirteen men, the Devil’s Dozen of the title, not as it was — something we can never know — but as it might have been.