The Quincunx: The Inheritance of John Huffam

John Huffman was to learn a great many things before he got very old: he would know why humans toiled under inhuman conditions, why the poor scavenged in rotting sewers, and why both the sane and the mad starved in asylums. Yet he did not know why an unnamed menace had haunted his childhood, hounded his mother, and now threatened his own life.

The answer lay in a document written half a century before, a document that had provoked avarice, hatred, murder and lunacy, that had determined the fates of five families, and had set the pattern of John’s own life. A pattern that was woven around, and would be unravelled within, the mysterious symbol of five—the Quincunx.

This edition contains a new Afterword by the author in which he examines the techniques, ironies and lessons to be learnt from writing a Victorian novel in the twentieth century (or from a twentieth century perspective).