House Of Sight & Shadow - Signed Edition

In a city still recovering from the ravages of plague and fire, two doctors crisscross the boundaries of morality. It is a challenge that leads Sir Edmund Calcraft, an eminent and notorious anatomist, and Joseph Bendix, his ambitious young student, into playing a dark game with the growing criminal underworld. At the heart of the book lies a haunting love story that both drives and threatens to destroy their quest.

In gallows and madhouses, in anatomical laboratories and a “Frost Fair” set on the frozen Thames, the two men engage in a competition involving both head and heart. Mixing history, myth, medicine, and fiction, The House of Sight and Shadow is a compelling tale about the fallibility of both love and reason.

"An impressively imaginative approach to history [and a] wry tale of a young man who is, to the last, sick with love." The Times (London)

"Refreshingly different...beautifully plotted....Griffin conjures up a London that is both distant and exotic, familiar and plausible." The Independent on Sunday (London)

"Ought to go straight onto the Booker shortlist for its intelligent writing, original plot, and remarkable grasp of historical details and language." Daily Mail (London)

Early 18th-century London is still recovering from the ravages of plague and fire. Sir Edmund Calcraft, an eminent and notorious anatomist, and Joseph Bendix, his ambitious young student, are drawn into a dark game with the growing criminal underworld. In gallows, madhouses, and in anatomical laboratories, the two men engage in a competition involving both head and heart.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN grew up in England and New York and wrote his first novel, The Requiem Shark, after genealogical research turned up a pirate in his family tree. He is at work on a third novel, also set in the eighteenth century, about a group of troublesome young Englishmen on a grand tour of Italy.

1. The House of Sight and Shadow is set in the eighteenth century. What do you think makes this book appeal to a modern audience?

2. Griffins research for The House of Sight and Shadow involved him actually spending time in mortuaries and medical schools for observation. Do you think that an author can get away with writing a realistic historical novel without doing this kind of on-the-scene research? How much research do you think is necessary for authors to complete before writing a work based on fact?

3. The House of Sight and Shadow is populated both by fictional and actual characters. Do you think this weakens or strengthens the sense of place?

4. Is it easier to believe in the life of an entirely fictional character, or one familiar from history?

5. Is blindness the central metaphor of the novel? We know who seems blindest by the end, but who do you think is the most clear-sighted of the characters? Which character understands London the best within the book?

6. The novel discusses the “insights” into science at the beginning of the eighteenth century. To our eyes they seem barbaric. Do you think there will be medical procedures that we endure today that will seem similarly archaic in a hundred years?

7. How justifiable are the crimes that the characters commit? Wild's coordination of the underworld was ruthless, but did it bring order? The thieving of bodies was illegal, but did it drive knowledge forward? Sheppard's robberies were petty, but did they deserve such punishment? These were the laws of London. But what other laws are the characters concerned with? Do morals or ethics have a role within the novel?

8. How does the characters concern, or lack of concern with the laws of London, affect their fate?

9. The novel sets up the opposing beliefs of the two doctors. Calcraft, a product of his day, a perfectionist and an empiricist. Bendix's beliefs are vaguer, as he searches to define the link between the body and its relationship to the mind. Science subsequently followed the path that Calcraft trod. What do you think would have happened had science swung towards Bendix's beliefs? Traditional science and alternative medicine are only now beginning to merge. Could this have happened earlier?

From the Trade Paperback edition.