For 170 years, Edward Fairfax Rochester has stood as one of literature's most romantic, complex and mysterious heroes. Sometimes haughty, sometimes tender --- professing his love for Jane Eyre in one breath and denying it in the next --- Mr. Rochester has for generations mesmerized, beguiled and, yes, baffled fans of Charlotte Brontë's masterpiece. But his own story has never been told. Now, out of Sarah Shoemaker's rich and vibrant imagination, springs Edward: a vulnerable, brilliant, complicated man whom we first meet as a motherless, lonely little boy roaming the corridors and stable yards of Thornfield Hall.