Book
The Square of Sevens
First published 2023
Cornwall, 1730. A young girl known as Red travels with her father, earning money by telling fortunes with a card-reading method called the Square of Sevens. After his sudden death she is taken into the household of a gentleman scholar and raised in Bath, where her unusual skill becomes a fashionable entertainment. Questions about her unknown mother and the enemies her father feared eventually draw her into a disputed inheritance involving two wealthy families and a trail that runs through Bath, London and Devon.
Shepherd-Robinson builds the mystery around the unstable boundaries between belief, fraud, science and social performance in early Georgian Britain. Bath’s polite society sits beside fairs, gambling, theatrical spectacle and popular fortune-telling, while property law and family legitimacy determine who can control great estates. Red’s ability to move between these worlds makes the novel both a family saga and a puzzle about how stories, documents and reputations can be manipulated when inheritance and status are at stake.
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