A literary tour-de-force ranging from the American frontier to the decadent carousing of the bright young people of London's Jazz Age   "A clever, stylish entertainment with dark undercurrents, set in the first third of the 20th century, Ask Alice traces the rise of an orphaned Kansas girl from pretty young thing on the prairie to bright young thing in 1920s London to society hostess in the '30s. Taylor—a British novelist and biographer of Thackeray and Orwell—alternates point of view between the woman and a boy of uncertain parentage. The book has all the makings of Victorian high drama—a slew of colorful characters, vivid and varied scenes, precipitous changes in fortune, and inescapable revelations of long-buried secrets." —The Atlantic Monthly