The World from Rough Stones

Found this in the library by just nabbing it off the shelf.. A must read for anyone in middle school or above. A celebration of a woman with brains, Mathematics, romance Life lessons, brain visuals, amazing. Loved it. followed by The Rich Are With You Always.

The first in the Stevenson family saga, and the first of Macdonald's many novels. This story is set in very early Victorian England from 1839 to 1841 against a backdrop of railroad building and and the economic upheavals this revolutionary form of transportation caused in it's youngest phase. Nora Telling, a brilliant but impoverished young woman of socially deplorable origins hitches her wagon to the star of John Stevenson, a navvy posessed of highly unusual talents whose own past is mysterious, stimulating to one's curiosity, and never clearly revealed, but not before meeting up in a manner later discomfiting to them both, with John's friend Walter Thornton, engineer and gentleman, who is looking forward to his upcoming marriage to Arabella Paine, Victorian ultra-lady. Each man soon discovers what a gem he (and the other) has taken to wife. The Stevensons start an ascent from poverty by their wits and any other means they can muster, above board or otherwise, while the Thorntons embark on a genteel connubial life. Or so it seems. Macdonald demonstrates a great gift for reconstructing the period of which he writes and fascinating us with it. Here he illuminates for us the great railroad boom and infant trade unions while relating the personal triumphs and tragedies of canny John Stevenson, and his commecially insightful Nora, hedonistic Walter Thornton and his vexatiously virtuous Arabella. Watch for the author's sly tribute to one of the classics of Victorian erotica.