The Finest Print

Langston (author of the LJ Best Book Forever Your Rogue) offers a story bound up in stories. Belinda Sinclair made a fateful choice, to break her engagement with a bully of a man, hoping that life could offer her more. It did not. Judged and scorned by outsiders, but beloved in her family, she strives to write a novel to no avail. Then she meets American journalist Ethan Fletcher, who has inherited a Fleet Street print shop only to find he will lose it if he cannot pay off a huge debt. Hindered by a news tax designed to control information, Ethan persuades Belle to write a serialized penny dreadful for him. Through first and second drafts, laying out type and finding paper, and—in ways that will win readers’ hearts—finding in each other their own missing pieces, Belle and Ethan print a new life for themselves. The details of Fleet Street, publishing laws, and marketing and serial distribution are equally engaging as the love story and infuse the novel with a sense of verisimilitude.