The Butcher's Daughter: The Hitherto Untold Story of Mrs. Lovett - Hardcover

by David Demchuk (Author), Corinne Leigh Clark (Author)

The story of the vengeful barber Sweeney Todd has gripped fans across literary, stage, and screen renditions--but little has been told of Mrs. Lovett, Todd's partner in crime. Until now.

Enclosed herewith: a bloodcurdling correspondence of horror and intrigue, based on the original Victorian penny dreadful that started it all.

"Your fingers may bleed with paper cuts as you tear through The Butcher's Daughter . . . I am spellbound."--Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

London, 1887: At the abandoned apartment of a missing young woman, a dossier of evidence is collected, ordered chronologically, and sent to the Chief Inspector of the London Metropolitan Police. It contains a frightening correspondence between an inquisitive journalist, Miss Emily Gibson, and the woman Gibson thinks may be the infamous Mrs. Lovett--Sweeney Todd's accomplice, "a wicked woman" who baked men into pies and sold them in her pie shop on Fleet Street. The talk of London Town--even decades after her horrendous misdeeds.

As the woman relays the harrowing account of her life in the unruly and perilous streets of Victorian London, her missives unlock an intricate mystery that brings Miss Gibson closer to the truth, even as that truth may cost her everything. A hair-raising and breathtaking novel for fans of Sarah Waters and Gregory Maguire, The Butcher's Daughter is an irresistible literary thriller that draws richly from historical sources and shines new light on the woman behind the counter of the most disreputable pie shop ever known.

Author Biography

David Demchuk's debut, The Bone Mother, was nominated for the Giller Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Toronto Book Award, the Kobzar Book Award and a Shirley Jackson Award, and won the 2018 Sunburst Award for Best Novel. RED X was listed as a CBC Books pick for Best Canadian Fiction of the Year, and a New York Public Library Best Book of 2021. He now lives with his husband in St. John's, Newfoundland.

Corinne Leigh Clark's gothic heart loves shadowy stories about Victorian London. In 2018, an excerpt from her manuscript-in-progress set in the slums of 19th-century London won a PRH Canada Student Award for Fiction. She is a graduate of the University of Toronto's School of Continuing Education. She lives with her husband in southern Ontario, Canada.