The Restless Sex

In the gutters of the city, a girl named Stephanie Quest learns early that love is a luxury her parents cannot afford. Born to drug-addicted mother and father, she exists in the margins of early twentieth-century urban life, a lonely child whose only inheritance is neglect and the constant hum of urban decay. When John Cleland, a wealthy man hollowed out by the recent death of his wife, stumbles upon this child, he sees in her a chance at redemption for himself as much as rescue for her. The Restless Sex is a novel about the algebra of poverty and kindness, about what happens when someone with means encounters someone with nothing, and discovers the transaction reverses them both. Chambers writes with unsentimental precision about the textures of want, the particular loneliness of children who belong to no one, and the fragile possibility that one person's decision might alter another's entire trajectory. It is a period piece that speaks across the century to our own age of inequality, told with the economy and directness of a writer who understood that sentiment is the enemy of truth.