Sign-In
Cart
Air Like Champagne: A Novel of Victoria
Paperback
RomanceHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher Price: $17.99
Publisher: Aeolian Press
Published: Sep 18 2023
Pages: 388
Weight: 1.08
Height: 0.86 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Some contended that the American venture was a seduction; others a swindle; others yet, a calling.
For Beryl Newland, it was an escape.
On the run from a London sickroom and a frustrated suitor, Beryl joins an 1873 cadre of British colonists led by the Scottish silk merchant George Grant. Their object? To found the ranching town of Victoria, Kansas. Beryl quickly discovers, however, that broken hearts, like broken bodies, know no borders: The Great Plains with its champagne air beguiles and devastates with stunning impartiality. There, she and the women she meets forge friendship and enmity in a crucible of clashing cultures, violence, and disappointment.
Seeking identity and independence from the men - idealists, speculators, and ne'er-do-well aristocrats - who populate Victoria, Beryl finds herself attracted to a talented musician from Russia, an immigrant her brother scorns as a peasant. Only when this relationship leads to near tragedy does Beryl realize how much Old-World social constraints continue to bind them all - and how she, like Victoria's passionate leader George Grant, will have to face down the dangers that accompany loving anyone or anything too much.
Air like Champagne: A Novel of Victoria celebrates the lives and legends that added color to Fort Hays and the Smoky Hill region of western Kansas in the 1870s. Drawing upon features of the gothic, the western, and the literary romance, it chronicles one woman's journey to resilience and mature love.
1 different editions
Also available
Also from
Windholz, Anne
Also in
Literary Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales Vol. 1 (Loa #26): The Pioneers / The Last of the Mohicans / The Prairie
Cooper, James Fenimore
Hardcover
The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume I: American Tabloid, the Cold Six Thousand; Introduction by Thomas Mallon
Ellroy, James
Hardcover
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Paperback
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts
Plath, Sylvia
Paperback
The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk
St Aubyn, Edward
Paperback