Forge and Furnace: A Novel

Sheffield's iron fires burn hot in this muscular Victorian portrait of a family and the empire they keep. Josiah Cornthwaite has built his steelworks from nothing, and he demands his son Christian inherit not just the business but the burning ambition that runs through their blood. But Christian wanders the forge with a poet's restless heart, more inclined toward the open road than the molten crucible. When the charming Claire Biron enters their orbit, she becomes the crucible anyway, drawing both the reluctant heir and a daring workman named Bram Elshaw into a tangle of longing and competing claims. What unfolds is a story of what we owe our fathers, what we owe ourselves, and the impossible distances between the hands that labor and the names that profit. Warden writes with sharp eye for the industrial sublime, the way fire transforms ore and ambition transforms families, and Sheffield becomes as much a character as any player in this heated drama of duty and desire.