Excerpt from The World of Tomorrow by Brendan Mathews, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Conversation turned to Sir Angus, his reasons for traveling to New York, and oh-by-the-way, was he traveling alone? Francis explained that he was escorting his younger brother to New York for medical attention. That much was true, though he transformed Michael into Malcolm to keep his alias intact. Young Malcolm had been grievously injured while foxhunting, he told them, and there wasn't a doctor in Britain or Ireland who could help him. "His case has baffled the finest medical minds in London, but I have high hopes for what the American doctors can tell us," he said, taking a swipe at the old empire while goosing the national pride of his companions. He quickly saw that his story had elicited another reaction: Anisette, who had lips like a bow on a box of sweets, practically cooed in admiration. This Sir Angus was both landed aristocrat and benevolent protector—a Scottish Mr. Darcy, minus the unpleasantness of the first thirty-odd chapters.

"It's admirable," she said, "what you're willing to do for your brother."

"The question, Miss Bingham, is what wouldn't I be willing to do for my brother?"

Francis was growing more confident with the quality of his counterfeit Scotsmanship. As the entrées were presented, he asked the Binghams what news they had from home. "I must confess that I devote little time to ex-colonial affairs," he said, but the truth was that life in Dublin had offered only a moviegoer's knowledge of New York: newsreels, The Thin Man, Forty-Second Street, A Night at the Opera. He should have known more about the city. His older brother, Martin, had emigrated years before, but Francis knew little of his life; he was a musician, married, had a child or two, and lived in a place unmusically called the Bronx. Over the years, communication between the brothers had gone from strained to nonexistent. Martin knew nothing of Francis's escape, Michael's condition, or their father's recent death. Of course Francis would seek him out, but first he had to decide what to tell him. Martin was sure to have questions that Francis wasn't ready to answer.

But while Martin could be difficult, the Americans were easy. He had assumed that they would be a uniformly anti-royalist lot; what about their man George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson with his "all men are created equal" talk? Surely the Americans would have been bred with a distaste for crowned heads and any hint of duke- or earlishness. But no. Thanks to Francis's accent and the rumor of a peerage, the Americans aboard the Britannic—the women, especially—were drawn to him like crows to corn. And Francis, for his part, was playing the peacock. The suits he had purchased in Cork were not backbench grays and clubbish blues. He had paired glen plaids with boldly tartaned waistcoats; if he was in for a Glasgow penny, he was in for an Edinburgh pound. It should not have surprised him, once he saw the stir he caused, how easy it was for word to spread. He'd had one brief chat on the top deck with a woman whose hat he had rescued from the rapacious winds of the North Atlantic, and by the late dinner seating Angus MacFarquhar was the most eligible bachelor on the Britannic.

While the Binghams courted the favor of Sir Angus, Horace Walter engaged in vociferous, fact-free talk about Roosevelt and his latest plans for the ruination of the country. His greatest fear was the final takeover of America by communists, socialists, freeloaders, court-packers, and others bent on stripping the best members of society of all they owned and passing it willy-nilly to the drunks and the wastrels who still lined up for free soup and stale bread. Before he resumed drowning himself in gin and creamed herring, he opined that the Depression hadn't been all bad—that it had, in fact, helped to thin the ranks of a certain class of bounders who had gate-crashed high society in the '20s.

Excerpted from The World of Tomorrow by Francine Mathews. Copyright © 2017 by Francine Mathews. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.