Dead-Sea Fruit

Dead-Sea Fruit is a Victorian novel of ambition, identity, and disillusionment. After his mother’s death, gifted young Eustace Thorburn seeks the truth of his parentage and the wrongs done to her. His quest intersects with London society’s fragile reputations, where marriage, desire, and propriety collide. Moving between Belgian canals and English drawing rooms, Braddon exposes the emptiness beneath glittering success and the moral cost of betrayal, secrecy, and social ambition.