Description

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London, 1735. Covent Garden offers a world of pleasures and diversions, even for a blind man. Tom Finch, composer of broadsides and assistant conductor in the nearby opera houses, considers himself the luckiest of men. Blindness is to him merely an inconvenience, and no impediment to his favored pastimes: playing music and lushing it in a public house in the company of Jem Castleton, his crony and amanuensis. And of course chasing after women...Tess Turnbridge, a soprano with a burning ambition to become an opera star, finds her first leading role in a second-rate theater with an unusual conductor, so handsome despite his blindness. Tom Finch has no place in her career plans, yet she finds she can't stop thinking about him...Sally Salisbury, a tough, flash talking whore and part-time thief. Tom is hopelessly in love with her, despite all warnings that she will be the cause of his ruination...Join Tom for a picaresque romp through high and low Georgian society among rakes, rovers, thieving whores and demireps, highway robbers, bigamists, and duelists, bisexual opera divas, castrati, mollies, and cross-dressers, lecherous aristocrats, and prim ladies in this meticulously researched, witty and lively tale in the tradition of Tom Jones and Vanity Fair.