Arthur Mervyn

Philadelphia, 1793. A young man from the countryside arrives in a city being devoured by yellow fever. He falls ill, is rescued by a kindly doctor, and in gratitude tells the physician his life story. But as other voices emerge, each contradicting Arthur's account, the reader is left to wonder: who is this young man really? What began as a tale of rural innocence corrupted by urban vice becomes something far more unsettling. Brown, who survived the actual epidemic that killed five thousand Philadelphians in a single autumn, renders the city's terror with visceral precision: the abandoned streets, the death carts, the doomed and the dying. Yet the true horror lies not in the disease but in the story itself. Every confession may be performance. Every apparent truth may be a mask. One of American literature's first and most radical experiments with unreliable narration, Arthur Mervyn asks what we owe to those who save us, and what lengths we will go to reinvent ourselves when everything has been lost.