Thomas Gage

Thomas Gage is a happy man. He has a fine house in Norfolk, two delightful children, a wife who brought with her a nice income from her father's paint firm, a Waterloo medal (he fought in the battle when he was 19), and a painting on show at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Then, a few months after Thomas Gage's fiftieth birthday, Julius Gooby enters his life. Mr Gooby is a man of the future, manager of the proposed North Norfolk Railway from Norwich to Cromer, and the route of the railway crosses Gage's land.When the railway comes, tragedy, and Thomas Gage's life begins to unravel until, at the end, medal on his chest, he travels to London to watch the Duke of Wellington's funeral and to take his revenge. Following the acclaimed Temple of Optimism, in Thomas Gage Jame Flemming has fashioned another historcal fiction of the very first rank, a portait of a good man undone by grief, by others' greed and , ultimately, by progress