In the early 1900s, Bessie Bawtry, a small child with big notions, lives in a South
Yorkshire mining town in
England Precocious and
refined in a land of little
ambition and much mining grime, Bessie waits for the day she can escape the bleak, coarse
existence her ancestors had seldom questioned.
Nearly a century later Bessie's granddaughter, Faro Gaulden, is listening to a lecture on genetic inheritance. She has returned to the depressed little town in which Bessie grew up and wonders at the families who never left. Confronted with what would have been her life had her grandmother stayed, she finds herself faced with difficult questions. Is she really so different from the South Yorkshire locals? As she soon learns, the past has a way of reasserting itself-not unlike the peppered moth that was once thought to be nearing extinction but is now enjoying a sudden unexplained resurgence.
The Peppered Moth is a brilliant novel, full of irony, sadness, and humor.
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