Brookland

Emily Barton's fiction has appeared in
Story, American Short Fiction
, and
Conjunctions
. Her first novel,
The Testament of Yves Gundron
, called “blessedly post-ironic, engaging, and heartfelt” by Thomas Pynchon, won the Bard Fiction Prize and was named a
New York limes
Notable Book of the Year. She is the recipient of a 2006 artist's grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2006 fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

www.emilybarton.com

ALSO BY EMILY BARTON

The Testament of Yves Gundron

Additional Praise for
Brookland

“Marvelous . . . So much modern fiction thinks small, feels small. Emily Barton will never be accused of either. . . .
Brookland
turns out to be a story not just of risk, daring, and ambition but of the courage to fail—and the courage to live on after failing.”

—Christopher Corbett,
The New York Times Book Review

“If honoring archaic diction, ancient gin-distilling processes, and eighteenth-century bridge-building techniques while composing a compelling narrative sounds ambitious, it is. But Barton is certainly up to the task. . . . In the end,
Brookland
is a wonderfully realized novel, one with atmosphere and ideas to match.”

—Kelly McMasters,
Time Out New York

“In seamless, period-rich prose, Barton relates how a young woman gambles everything to construct her obsession: a doomed wooden behemoth spanning the East River. . . . Captivating.”

—Florence Kane,
Vogue

“A poignant tale of sisters who run a gin distillery in late eighteenth-century Brooklyn . . . Barton fashions an enchanting saga for her sophomore effort; it is a major New York book of the season.”

—Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

“Readers used to four-page chapters and breathless narration should take a deep breath, slow down, and smell the lavender and anise. . . . With her poignant novel, Barton turns imagination and luminous prose into precision instruments that measure how cracks in a foundation can undo the most solid-seeming of structures.”

—Yvonne Zipp,
The Christian Science Monitor

“No historical novel in recent memory has amassed such an imposing wealth of rich period detail, and few novels of any genre extend an increasingly absorbing story to such a powerful, sorrowful conclusion. A brilliant book that should be a strong Pulitzer Prize contender.”

—Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

“Barton's novel weaves an engaging narrative of three sisters bound by unconditional love, their family's gin mill—and simmering resentment.”

—Sarah Childress,
Newsweek

“This is a fictional book about dreams, drive, and tragedy, but it also recreates, with vivid description, the real world of the past. For those of us who wonder what life was like so long ago, the rewards are rich indeed.”

—The Arizona Republic

“Barton thinks deeply about her subjects; her imagination has unusually wide bounds; the austerity of her voice at once offers and withholds revelation.”

—The News & Observer

“
Brookland
is a marvelously beguiling novel. From first elegant page to last, Emily Barton has rendered an enticing story, one both moving and entertaining at every level. It's a dazzling and thrilling read, truly an exemplar of modern literature.”

—Katharine Weber, author of
Triangle

Emily Barton

FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
New York

BROOKLAND
. Copyright © 2006 by Emily Barton. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.picadorusa.com

Picador
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For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, as well as ordering, please contact Picador.
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Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott

A portion of this work was originally published, in slightly different form, in
Conjunctions
.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Haiku used as epigraph, from
The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, and Issa
, edited and with an introduction by Robert Hass. Introduction and selection copyright © 1994 by Robert Hass. Unless otherwise noted, all translations copyright © 1994 by Robert Hass. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Frontispiece: Illustration of the “Flying Pendent Lever Bridge” from Thomas Pope's
Treatise on Bridge Architecture
, New York, 1811. Courtesy of Lehigh University Digital Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barton, Emily, 1969–

Brookland / Emily Barton.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-42580-7

ISBN-10: 0-312-42580-5

1. New York (State)—History-1775-1865—Fiction. 2. Women—New York(State)—Fiction. 3. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. 4. Sisters—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3552.A7685B76 2006

813'.54—dc22

2005016269

First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

FOR JEROME DOUGLAS BARTON

Chrysanthemum growers—

You are the slaves

of chrysanthemums!

—Yosa Buson

(translated by Robert Hass)

BROOK LAND

A
t the close of the workday on Thursday the twenty-fourth of January, 1822, Prue Winship sat down at the large desk in the countinghouse of Winship Daughters Gin to write a letter to her daughter, Recompense. The power train had been sprung free of the windmill for the night, and the machines of the distillery sat quiet, the embers of its great fires still smoldering. Prue could hear the low horn of the steam ferry as it approached the Brooklyn landing. Her sister, Tem, with whom she ran the distillery, had retired an hour since to the Liberty Tavern, and had said she'd be home for supper; their overseer, Isaiah Horsfield, had gone home to his family. He'd left a stack of papers on his section of the desk, and would no doubt see to them first thing in the morning.

Prue's husband and fourteen-year-old son awaited her return, but she did not wish to put off writing the letter another day. In honor of Prue's fiftieth birthday, her daughter had sent her a lavish gift: a magnificent paisley shawl Recompense's father-in-law had brought back from a journey to Kashmir. Prue had opened the packet the evening before, and had delighted in the shawl's softness and its jewel-like shades of blue and green. When she'd wrapped it around herself in the kitchen, her son, Matty, had clapped in admiration and proclaimed her “the very queen of the Gypsies.” Tem had shaken her head.

Prue might have dispatched her thanks in a quick note, had Recompense not enclosed a letter with the parcel. After wishing her mother a happy birthday, she had written the good news that she was with child.
Should no ill befall her, she expected to deliver in the autumn. In light of this disclosure, and of the obvious adulthood it bestowed on its bestower, Recompense asked her mother to tell her about the bridgeworks, which she knew had caused her parents both happiness and misfortune, but about whose history she knew little. Recompense had never, until that moment, gathered herself to ask either of her parents about that chapter in their lives. The distillery had consumed most of her mother's time and energy, and Recompense had always feared importuning her with questions that might spoil her for business. As for Recompense's father, he was too good-natured and self-effacing to be much of a storyteller, and she found it difficult to cast him in her imagination as an actor in any sort of drama. Yet she wished to know the story of the bridge, if her mother had the time and inclination to entrust it to her.