The Benefactor

Clara Munro sells gloves by day and writes essays no one in her life ever reads. When one of them reaches Oliver Trethewey, bookseller, publisher, and the only man in London willing to print a name no one has heard of, she writes back. Then she meets him. He is forty-nine. He has spent twenty years making other people's careers and none of his own. He has a reputation for being right about writers and wrong about everything else. She is twenty-two. She has a novel, a set of opinions, and absolutely nothing else. Everyone in London knows what a man like Trethewey wants from a girl like Clara Munro. The two of them know that the truth is far more dangerous, and far better for her book. But when a publisher decides to sell her novel under a gentleman's name, Clara will have to choose between the career she has been handed and the one she has to fight for — and Oliver Trethewey will have to choose what his name is actually worth.