He said, ‘No, you bloody fool – that’s not what I meant! I want to see the pretty one!’ The stranger looked at her for a moment, then burst out laughing. ‘Alma! Come instantly! You are requested to be seen!’Īlma rushed into the atrium, bright with expectation. Her adopted sister Prudence is her opposite, a striking beauty, lacking in education, although not in intelligence. What Alma lacks in physical beauty is made up for by her exceptional intelligence and her first-class education. He strategically marries a cold, intelligent Dutch woman, with whom he has Alma. Through hard work and bendy morals, Henry builds up an empire in the trade of exotic plants and becomes ‘one of the three wealthiest men in the Western Hemisphere’. Unlike his father who is ‘forceless’ and ‘complacent’, Henry is ambitious, cynical and willing to do anything to get rich. The Signature of All Things begins in England in the 1760s with the rags-to-riches story of Alma’s father, Henry Whittaker, the son of an orchard man at Kew Gardens, who grows up in extreme poverty surrounded by equally extreme wealth. Equally compelling is the novel’s unlikely heroine, Alma Whittaker, a multi-layered and unusual character and a woman with a brilliant scientific brain born in the wrong century. Firstly, Elizabeth Gilbert is an outstanding storyteller: funny, insightful and ambitious. I never thought I’d get excited by a novel about botany, but The Signature of All Things proved me wrong.
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