The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of September 2018: For those of you who didn’t think, “You had me at mermaid,” neither did I! But I’m so glad I read Imogen Hermes Gowar’s The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock or I would have missed one of the most delicious debuts of 2018. A Georgian romp reminiscent of Sarah Waters’s wonderfully bawdy Victorian-era novels, it follows the unlikely courtship of a celebrated courtesan and a decidedly undazzling merchant. The latter has come into a windfall, owing to the sale of a deceased merbaby (just go with it—the writing is that good), but it turns out that their union isn’t just reliant on the size of his…wallet. The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock is a treat of a read with clever, immersive dialog and enough twists and turns to make you wish the word count was even more generous (it's 496 pages). But it also slyly scrutinizes class, gender, and race divides—adding a layer of depth to a novel that is hopefully the first of many for Ms. Gowar. —Erin Kodicek, Amazon Book Review