Joshua Marvel

In the cramped workshops of Stepney, a boy named Joshua Marvel watches his father's hands shape wood into profitless things and decides: not me. The year is 1871, and young Joshua knows with a fierce, almost painful clarity that he was made for something beyond the lathe's endless whine. His father George, a wood-turner whose calloused hands have never known anything else, cannot understand this restlessness. His mother watches both men she loves pull in different directions, her heart divided between pride and fear. Farjeon renders this struggling family with the kind of tenderness that only comes from really looking at working people: their arguments over tea, their small dignities, their dreams tucked away like forbidden luxuries. Joshua's refusal to accept his inheritance is not mere rebellion; it is a young man's desperate wager against a world that has already decided what he will become. This is a novel about what it costs to want more, and whether wanting is itself a kind of courage.