Quinn's Book

<b>Filled with Dickensian characters a vivid sense of history and marvelously inventive humor <i>Quinn's Book</i> is an engaging delight from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of <i>Ironweed</i> <p/>Kennedy writes with verve and nerve. His wit always sharp has rarely been sharper. He paints a full and lively canvas...<i>Quinn's Book</i> casts a lovely light indeed.--Stephen King</b> <p/> From the moment he rescues the beautiful passionate Maud Fallon from the icy waters of the Hudson one wintry day in 1849 Daniel Quinn a twelve-year-old orphan is thrust into a bewildering adventure-filled journey through the tumult of nineteenth-century America. As he quests after the beguiling and elusive Maud (she's fourteen) Daniel will witness the rise and fall of great dynasties in upstate New York epochal prize fights exotic life in the theater visitations from spirits beyond the grave horrific battles between Irish immigrants and the Know-Nothings the vicious New York draft riots heroic passages through the Underground Railroad and the bloody despair of the Civil War.<br> <p/><br><b>William Kennedy's Albany Cycle</b> of novels reflect what he once described as the fusion of his imagination with a single place. A native and longtime resident of Albany New York his work moves from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century chronicling family life the city's netherworld and its spheres of power--financial ethnic political--often among the Irish-Americans who dominated the city in this period. The novels in his cycle include <i>Legs</i> <i>Billy Phelan's Greatest Game</i> <i>Ironweed</i> <i>Quinn's Book</i> <i>Very Old Bones</i> <i>The Flaming Corsage</i> and <i>Roscoe</i>.