Anne Jaccob is coming of age in late eighteenth-century London, the daughter of a wealthy merchant. When she is taken advantage of by her tutor — a great friend of her father’s — and is set up to marry a squeamish snob named Simeon Onions, she begins to realize just how powerless she is in Victorian society. Anne is watchful, cunning, and bored.

Her saviour appears in the form of Fub, the butcher’s boy. Their romance is both a great spur and an excitement. Anne knows she is doomed to a loveless marriage to Onions and she is determined to escape with Fub and be his mistress. But will Fub ultimately be her salvation or damnation? And how far will she go to get what she wants?

Dark and sweeping, The Butcher’s Hook is a richly textured debut featuring one of the most memorable characters in fiction.

JANET ELLIS is an English television presenter and actress, best known for the BBC’s Blue Peter and Jigsaw. She has also been a Costa prize judge and is a graduate of the Curtis Brown Creative Writing School. The Butcher’s Hook is her first novel. She lives in London.

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The rush of this novel is its macabre sense of justice…[a] thrill…

Globe and Mail

…the dark, Gothic tale is not what you’d expect…

Metro

…[Ellis] manages to keep up the interest as Anne’s love story turns into something much darker.

Winnipeg Free Press

Anne is a heroine unlike any we’ve met before in historical fiction — prickly, amoral, opportunistic, determined to eke what happiness she can from life, even if it means spilling a bit of blood.

Toronto Star