Description
Gretje Reyniers is one of the unacknowledged mothers of New York-whore, moneylender, and pelt dealer when the city was still a tiny, hardscrabble colony of the Dutch. She left a formidable impression in the records of colonial New Amsterdam, but these are hardly more than a catalog of petty crimes. So in this vivid and haunting novel, Michael Pye sets out to imagine her whole, back to her wild, indomitable self.
He conjures her time in Amsterdam, among the prostitutes and fishwives and maids of that city-and her love for a sailor called Anthony the Turk. She ships out for America when it was still an empty wilderness, and builds a life and a fortune by sheer will in a brutal place. And even in grief, she triumphs over a censorious but scandalous town.
ISBN:9780670865987
