Storyville

New Orleans, turn of the century. Storyville was where prostitution flourished, legal for nearly twenty years, in a city renowned for sin, seduction, and sex. In between comes this story of two women inextricably linked by, as they called it, "the District.". Kate, young, beautiful, and completely green, abandoned by a man who doesn't love her, finds herself thrown on the mercies of the city. She knows that Mollie Q. - one of New Orleans's most enterprising madams - is offering the best she's likely to get. Julia Randsome is a transplanted Yankee - a supporter of women's rights, who, against everyone's advice, marries into one of the city's most prominent families. She will discover too late that her husband Charles, owns considerable property in Storyville - and isn't prepared to give it up - even for her. Kate and Julia occupy different universes in New Orleans, but somehow, in that city, all roads lead to the same place - back to the District. These two women, one a patrician, the other a prostitute, are so richly drawn, so complicated, that they seem as real as our own families. You will never forget them - or this novel, the kind of once-in-a lifetime book that reminds us just how pleasurable reading can be. As lush and provocative as New Orleans itself, Storyville sweeps across lines of caste and blood, money and desire - and into the voluptuous secrets of a city as tempting as any on earth.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.