Cheap Jack Zita opens at Tawdry Fair in Ely, where the mist-covered Fens give way to chaos and color. Cheap Jack, a traveling vendor whose health is failing, sets up his van outside the cathedral while his daughter Zita moves through the crowd with sharp eyes and quicker wit. She's equal parts salesperson and protector, fielding attention from local youths while keeping watch over her father's diminishing strength. This is a novel about what endures when everything shifts: the bond between a dying man and the daughter who must carry on without him, the strange economy of fairgrounds where gentry and gypsies collide, and the fierce independence of those who live on the road. Baring-Gould captures a world that had already begun to vanish by 1893, preserving the language, customs, and contradictions of traveling England in exquisite detail. For readers who crave the raw, vanishing world of Hardy and the fierce female presences of Victorian fiction, Zita is a revelation.
