The Silver Hearted: A Novel
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A darkly suspenseful sea-faring novel that turns pulp fiction on its head with writing so gorgeous author Edmund White calls it “our Heart of Darkness.”
The Silver Hearted: A Novel David McConnell
Set against a background of revolution and profiteering in an unnamed port city, this is the story of an ex-wastrel hired to look after a vast sum of money by a cabal of shadowy investors. Literally chests of silver coins, the fortune must be protected at all costs. For assistance, the nervous guardian turns to a sailor, a beautiful naïf, who helps evacuate the money when the trading emporium is overrun by violent mobs. In a hopeless confusion of fondness and morals, the boy wants acknowledgement that as a consequence of their flight lives were destroyed—destroyed for the sake of money. Unfortunately, a ruthless calculus of profit and loss has mesmerized the money’s guardian. Warfare is closing in. Again, he has to get the fortune out of a city offering only temporary and uneasy shelter.
"The Silver Hearted is our Heart of Darkness. It is just as ominous, as violent, as exotic, as darkly colonial. But it is a lot better written than Conrad's book. Whereas Conrad is always resorting to ‘the unspeakable,’ McConnell tells us everything in glowing detail and in fresh, eloquent language. Sexy, demonic, elusive, The Silver Hearted is a perfect work of art.”—Edmund White
"There's no recipe for a novel as artfully unique as The Silver Hearted, but you might start by sifting Joseph Conrad into Graham Greene, and then adding a pinch of Robert Louis Stevenson (pirates!) and a soupcon of Tom of Finland (sailors!). Most of the other ingredients of this wildly engaging and transporting novel are David McConnell's gorgeous secrets, for who else knew that such a thrilling story of action and adventure could be told in such sublimely elegant and brilliant prose?" —Peter Cameron
New York-based novelist David McConnell, whose short fiction and criticism have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, is the author of the fictional memoir The Firebrat.
