Twelfth Night
The year is 1857, New Orleans’ Golden Era when cotton and rice, sugar, and slavery buoyed the exotic city to rare wealth as America’s fourth metropolis. It is half a century since Napoleon ceded Louisiana to the young United States, yet relations between French Creoles and Americans remain strained. Downriver lies the carré de la ville, last bastion of the old Creole families, while upriver is the Garden District of the American nouveau riche. The neutral ground is Canal Street. These two widely disparate cultures share neither language nor religion, customs nor cuisine. The xenophobic Catholic Creoles dismiss les Americains as greedy bourgeois boors while the industrious Protestant Americans find the Creoles impossibly aloof and decadent, obsessed with opera, theater, balls, and dueling. Business dealings frequently wrest a crossing of paths, but diehards on both sides of Canal resist social commingling. Those attempting to bridge the schism often flirted with disaster. This is the story of two such pilgrims meeting on Twelfth Night and confronting their fragile fate on Ash Wednesday. Their destiny, unfolding against the tawdry glamour and raw violence of Mardi Gras, is as heady as carnival itself.
(Available in ebook and print)
“Entertaining…a solid sense of life in antebellum New Orleans.” –Publisher’s Weekly
“Llewellyn has a real gift for atmosphere and characterization…exploiting the rich possibilities of the Quadroon Balls, the class conflict of Mardi Gras, and the voodoo legends of Congo Square and Marie Laveau…Twelfth Night will be the gilded bean in your king cake.” –New Orleans Times-Picayune.
“Accurately captures the atmosphere of New Orleans and Mardi Gras. The background material is well-researched, the spicy story is well-written and the pace is suspenseful.” –The Jackson Clarion- Ledger
“Set in the rich cultural gumbo of 19th century New Orleans, the history and lore of that fabled city are interwoven throughout. A compelling tale.” –Richard Sexton, co-author of Elegance & Decadence
“Fevered and vivid with a shattering finale.” –Bethany Bultman, author of Reflections of the South
