Riding, vol. 1
by H.S. Cross
ISBN: 978-0-6152-1366-8
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Gray Riding lives in a black-and-white world bedeviled by certainty. Punishment follows wrongdoing, subordinates obey authority, death is the consequence of illness. Gray Riding studies at an English public school—a greenhouse of the great—twelve years after the first World War. The past weighs on him, this prodigy with the pen; he is too clever and too preoccupied to be thinking about a girl with t-strap shoes.
Cordelia Líoht lives a nuanced life. Her mother suffers from a condition that the best doctors in Europe cannot relieve. Her father is…somewhere, and…sometimes she longs to be with him, or at least to travel the globe as he does. She writes air-mail letters and delights in the complexity of mazes, maps, and dreams. She is too vivacious, too expansive to feel any attraction for the provincial world of English schoolboys.
When Gray meets Cordelia, will the world as they know it change forever? What could a loquacious girl and a taciturn boy have to say to one another, beyond yes, or no, or sorry?
Cold dormitories, Yorkshire rain, London theater, Parisian salons, German spas, Irish wellsprings, English summers, and the hearts of the people abiding there. A vanished world, restored in vividness. Living as we do, so much better than our grandparents, in our best of all possible worlds, what could we possibly need from theirs, imperfect and closing in on cataclysm?
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More Information
Riding is divided into two volumes due to length. It is, however, a single novel, not a novel with a sequel. Think of those Victorian novels split into two (or more) volumes. Read about volume two.