Product Description

Grey cloth book with turquoise border on spine and gilt lettering, turquoise tipped page edges. Story begins with the day when the battle of Waterloo was fought and ends when the nineteenth century was drawing to a close. Book Club Edition

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #502486 in Books
• Published on: 1955
• Binding: Hardcover
• 930 pages

Customer Reviews

The Tontine by Thomas Costain
I read this book when it was first published in 1955. Long out of print, it is a fascinating story, superbly told by a gifted writer, about the participants in a lottery (the tontine). In a tontine, the money is paid out to the sole survivor; and this can take a lifetime to accomplish, as first one, then another of the many original participants dies. The reader is instantly caught up in the lives of the characters, and is kept in marvelous suspense until the end. Costain has crafted a brilliant and beautiful novel. I can't wait to read it again!!

Not a lot of swash being buckled
Since I've had these 2 volumes on my shelf for almost 30 years, I thought I'd read them. Costain, author of The Silver Chalice, et al, has a good sense of a panorama of history; his characterizations are generally well-drawn, if oftentimes drawn from stock. The plot is not as swashbuckling as I thought it would be, but it certainly kept the attention for 900+ pages. My only quibble with him is that while I see he needs to stretch out the story from 1814-1870 something, (the dates are seldom clear, intentionally), there are characters that come and go, hundreds of them, 90% of whom you never hear of again--others you need to remember for a 400 page gap when they pop up again. The text could have used either a list of characters or a family tree to help the poor reader out. The story involves wresting a tontine from a blackguard and legitimizing it--a tontine is a sort of insurance policy annuity and a lottery all in one, whereby one receives money every year from it, and as people in the 'class' of tontine die off, one received more and more each year. The climax of the story is the intrigue that happens when the tontine is down to 3 old players, who know each other and who coincidentally live near each other. But to get to that point it takes forEVer to set up, with characters that are not exactly Dickensian, but which you can tell Costain hoped would be perceived as such. There are moments of adventure, but otherwise many subplots that aren't terribly interesting and go nowhere. I am sure that with some telescoping, the book could be 300 pages less at least and have the same impact. Nonetheless, if you have the time and like this kind of quasi-adventure story, it's a classic of its kind.