Printed on the Thames

About this book

London, the great frost of 1814. Lett Garrow is twenty, deaf in one ear, and the fastest compositor in Southwark, though no master will bind a girl. When the Thames freezes and her drunken master hauls his press onto the ice to print souvenir cards, a stranger in a dead waterman's coat asks her to set a name she cannot pronounce. Her hands do it anyway. The ice sings, and the stranger stops breathing like a man. Now Lett is bound to a creature of the Starling Court, the old people under London Bridge who walk only when the river does not, and their queen wants Lett's hands for one last name that could keep London frozen forever. She has four days of frost fair to decide what her hands are for, and whether what she feels for Fennick is hers at all.