Excerpt from A Net for Small Fishes by Lucy Jago, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Do not go."

There was a firmness in this command that I rarely heard from him. It so surprised me that I laughed.

"You would stop me?"

"That place ruins people."

I meant no insult to him, but it is a foolish woman who puts her whole trust in a husband. My own father drank and gambled away my mother's inheritance and together they died in want; grief for her lodged in my ribs and has not waned. It is a hurt without remedy. One cannot act as if these things never happened. George neither drank nor gambled, but to move in Court circles, even as a doctor, incurred enormous expense. Debt hung around our necks and a short run of bad luck would have bankrupted us. If there was something I could do to make our lives less precarious, and to recover the honor forfeit by my mother for marrying beneath her, I would do it.

Excerpted from A Net for Small Fishes by Lucy Jago. Copyright © 2021 by Lucy Jago. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.