Farthing

First published in 2006, Jo Waltons Farthing was hailed as a masterpiece, a darkly romantic thriller set in an alternate postwar England sliding into fascism.

Eight years after they overthrew Churchill and led Britain into a separate peace with Hitler, the upper-crust families of the “Farthing set” are gathered for a weekend retreat. Among them is estranged Farthing scion Lucy Kahn, who cant understand why her and her husband Davids presence was so forcefully requested. Then the country-house idyll is interrupted when the eminent Sir James Thirkie is found murdered—with a yellow Star of David pinned to his chest.

Lucy begins to realize that her Jewish husband is about to be framed for the crime—an outcome that would be convenient for altogether too many of the various political machinations underway in Parliament in the coming week. But whoevers behind the murder, and the frame-up, didnt reckon on the principal investigator from Scotland Yard being a man with very private reasons for sympathizing with outcasts and underdogs—and prone to look beyond the obvious as a result.

As the trap slowly shuts on Lucy and David, they begin to see a way out—a way fraught with peril in a darkening world.

JO WALTON won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer on the publication of her debut novel, The King's Peace. Her novel Tooth and Claw won the World Fantasy Award, and the novels of her Small Change sequence—Farthing, Ha'Penny, and Half a Crown—have won acclaim ranging from national newspapers to the Romantic Times Critics Choice Award. Most recently, her novel Among Others won the Nebula Award. A native of Wales, she lives in Montreal.