Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White. Edinburgh, Canongate, 2002. First edition, first printing. Printing sequence 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2. Black cloth over boards, marbled endpapers, gilt titles silk headbands and bookmark. 835 pp. Signed by the author on title page. Critically acclaimed modern take on Victorian sensation novel, read Fowles’s French Lieutenant’s Woman or Waters’s Fingersmith. Sharp unread copy.

Michel Faber has produced a landmark novel of London in 1875 moving into the prosperous commodity-based future – department stores and omnibuses, advertising hoardings, canned foods and shop-bought Christmas cards. Sex is on offer too. William Rackham, “an ageing young man” takes a shine to prostitute Sugar he sets about buying her and placing her lodging for his exclusive use.

This is a supremely literary novel. Everyone in it is a reader and writer of some kind. Sugar has been busy putting together her own narrative of vengeance against the male species, the kind of thing that Dickens’s Estella might have written if she had taken to literature. Echoes of Dickens and Eloit, yet teasing and post-modern. In some ways a more contemporary version of Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

Screened as a TV mini-series in 2011 with Amanda Hale as Agnes Rackham.

Condition: Very fine, sharp unread copy in like dust jacket