The Transformation

Tampa, Florida, 1898: a frontier where the old world meets the new. Dominating the town is the new Tampa Bay Hotel, with its tangle of Moorish minarets, cupolas and arches; its Byzantine domes and thirteen crescent moons; its electric lighting designed by Edison. This fairy-tale castle anchored by the water's edge is a winter magnet for bankers and industrialists, stockbrokers and shipping merchants, attorneys and architects and celebrities who come from as far away as Europe. But the hotel has one permanent resident, the enigmatic and exotic Monsieur Goulet III, amateur phrenologist and wig-maker to the plain and the glamorous alike - to any resident of Tampa whose desire for the transformations he creates is matched by pockets deep enough to meet his price. As the winter of 1898 nears its end, Goulet becomes entranced by the spectacular silver-blonde hair of a beautiful young widow, Marion Unger, and determines that the transformation it inspires him to create will be his masterpiece. But the raw material he needs for its completion is hard to come by, and so he drives his resourceful night-scavenger - a teenage cigar-maker who has fled the war in Cuba - to increasingly extreme efforts. As the fates of the widow, the wigmaker and the scavenger become ever more tightly entwined, Goulet's true nature, hitherto cleverly and obsessively disguised, begins to show itself, until it becomes clear that he will allow nothing to impede the progress of his ultimate transformation.

Self-Help

CATHERINE CHIDGEY

Personal Transformation

Picador

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Victoria University Press

The Beat of the Pendulum

Remote Sympathy

The Axeman's Carnival

Te Herenga Waka University Press

<p>Moving away from Munich isn’t nearly as wrenching an experience for Frau Greta Hahn as she had feared. Their new home is even lovelier than the one they left behind, and best of all – right on their doorstep – are some of the finest craftsmen from all over Europe, prepared to make for her and the other officers’ wives living in this small community anything they could possibly new curtains from the finest silks, furniture designed to the most exacting specifications, execute a fresco or a mural even.The looming presence of the nearby prison camp – lying just beyond a patch of forest – is the only blot to mar what is otherwise an idyllic life in Buchenwald.Frau Hahn’s husband, SS Sturmbannführer Dietrich Hahn, has taken up a powerful new position as camp administrator. The job is all consuming as he wrestles with corruption that is rife at every level, inadequate supplies, and a sewerage system under ever-growing strain as the prison population continues to rise.Frau Hahn’s obliviousness is challenged when she is forced into an unlikely alliance with one of Buchenwald’s prisoners, Dr Lenard Weber. A decade earlier he invented a machine – the Sympathetic Vitaliser – that at the time he believed could cure cancer. Does the machine work? Whether it does or not, it might yet save a life.</p>

Remote Sympathy: LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2022

Europa Editions

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