Created by Hephaestus and released into the world of men to bring both misery and hope, Pandora is a figure whose name conjures an expectation of mythic drama; but Susan Stokes-Chapman’s bestselling debut novel only hints gently at those possibilities. Her Pandora is a young woman living in an attic above her uncle’s shop of fake antiquities in 18th-century London, training herself to become a designer of fine jewellery.
One day, her crooked uncle illegally salvages from a shipwreck a Greek vase so old it cannot be dated, carved with images from the Pandora myth, and wreathed in horrifying bad luck. The narrative ranges between young antiquarian Edward, Pandora herself, and her uncle Hezekiah to chart the disasters and mysteries that follow. It dances between painstaking realism and the softest chance of the supernatural, courting both but marrying neither in an elegant negotiation that admits very different readings.
