Gin-making and Brooklyn Bridge

BROOKLAND. By Emily Barton. Farrar, Straus & Giroux €18.60

Emily Barton's second novel is a marvellous if slightly improbable tale of women, gin-making and the building of the first Brooklyn Bridge (not the one you may be thinking of, but that's part of the story). As a small child in late-18th-century America, Barton's central character, Prudence Winship, looks across the East River from the village of Brooklyn (or Brookland) at Manhattan, believing it to be the City of the Dead.

Prudence and her sister Temperance are the owners and operators of Winship Daughters Gin. The wonderfully inventive world they inhabit is both familiar and foreign: New York in the years from 1772 to 1822.

When Barton's novel begins, Dutch is still spoken on the streets. There are windmills and slaves. British troops are garrisoned in Brookland. Taverns are the centre of social life and balladeers travel the countryside.

The large and complex storytelling in Brookland is divided between a traditional third-person narrative and the much older Prudence's letters to her daughter. Both feature a large and complex cast. The three Winship sisters – Prudence, Temperance and the mute and spooky Pearl – are Barton's best creations.

The sisters, who inherit the distillery at their father's death, prove eminently capable of running a gin works in this male-dominated world – maybe because Prudence is rarely prudent and Temperance is never temperate. They have been reared in their father's trade, and if you learn nothing else reading Brookland you'll pick up more about making gin than you would have thought possible. (Nothing wrong with that.) Prue and Tem, as they're called, are fiercely independent. They're tough, smart and resourceful. But they live – and they know this all too painfully – in a world where they must be subservient in many things.

Prudence dreams of building a bridge to connect Brookland with Manhattan (well before the actual Brooklyn Bridge was completed in 1883). In that quest, Prudence enlists her lover and eventual husband, Ben Horsfield, who also happens to be a surveyor, and her sister Pearl, who plays a critical and terrible role in a scheme that brings much tragedy and grief to the Winships.

Brookland turns out to be a story not just of risk, daring and ambition but of the courage to fail – and the courage to live on after failing.

Christopher Corbett

© The New York Times