Paul Gosslett's Confessions in Love, Law, and the Civil Service

Paul Gosslett is not your typical hero. He's a young man of modest means and outsized ambitions, stumbling through mid-Victorian England with more enthusiasm than sense. When a friend offers him a peculiar commission rescue a kidnapped Englishman from Italian brigands in Calabria Paul jumps at the adventure, hoping it might launch him into the kind of drama his mundane civil service life has been lacking. What follows is a delightfully chaotic tale of mishaps and misadventures, as our narrator threads his way through the treacherous waters of love, law, and bureaucratic intrigue. The Italian adventure brings him face to face with real danger, real charm, and real absurdity. Lever, the Irishman who could make readers laugh louder than almost any Victorian novelist, gives us a protagonist whose confessions read like a charmed confession from a friend who's gotten himself into splendid trouble. It's picaresque, it's witty, and it moves with the momentum of a man who knows he's digging his own hole but can't stop digging.