Can one rash decision prove the difference between a life well lived and a life destroyed?
When the Marquess of Queensberry left his calling card at the Albemarle Club in February 1895, it bore only his name and five words: ‘For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite.’ The most celebrated playwright of his day famously sued for libel, which led to his arrest, criminal prosecution, and ultimately prison. From then on, his gilded existence spiraled into public disgrace, humiliation, and an early death.
But what if he had simply ignored the insult? What direction might his life have taken? This is the premise of John Boyne’s extraordinary new novel, The Weight of Angels. Rather than dying in penury in Paris at age forty-six, what if Wilde had lived to bear witness to the momentous events and cataclysmic changes of the first part of the twentieth century, and even influence some of them? What if the second half of his life were as dramatic, tumultuous, and exhilarating as the first?
In imagining the life that Oscar Wilde never had, John Boyne has written one of the great what-if stories of modern literature, giving the iconic Anglo-Irish poet and playwright a fresh new voice and the opportunity to take an entirely different path.
Genre: Literary Fiction
When the Marquess of Queensberry left his calling card at the Albemarle Club in February 1895, it bore only his name and five words: ‘For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite.’ The most celebrated playwright of his day famously sued for libel, which led to his arrest, criminal prosecution, and ultimately prison. From then on, his gilded existence spiraled into public disgrace, humiliation, and an early death.
But what if he had simply ignored the insult? What direction might his life have taken? This is the premise of John Boyne’s extraordinary new novel, The Weight of Angels. Rather than dying in penury in Paris at age forty-six, what if Wilde had lived to bear witness to the momentous events and cataclysmic changes of the first part of the twentieth century, and even influence some of them? What if the second half of his life were as dramatic, tumultuous, and exhilarating as the first?
In imagining the life that Oscar Wilde never had, John Boyne has written one of the great what-if stories of modern literature, giving the iconic Anglo-Irish poet and playwright a fresh new voice and the opportunity to take an entirely different path.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"The Weight of Angels is a marvellous conceit -- a word Oscar himself might employ -- a richly inventive multi-media novel of literary might-have-beens. Boyne is at the very tip-top of his form, and the book is at once highly readable and an intellectual treat for Wildeans and the wide world." - John Banville
"John Boyne is one of our best authors writing today. The Weight of Angels is wise, imaginative, funny, and extremely moving. Art and Life, Tragedy and Love, you'll find them all here in this rich and magnificent novel." - Tan Twan Eng
"A spectacularly cheeky piece of speculative fiction, gleefully celebrating the possibilities of queer genius, subversive influence and alternative history. It also shows Boyne channeling his own bruising experience of notoriety into a moving exploration of regret and rehabilitation." - Patrick Gale
"John Boyne confers a second immortality on Oscar Wilde in this counterfactual life of the writer. It is granularly imagined, witty, hugely pleasurable to read, and exceptionally moving. A great public wrong can ruin a life, as it did Wilde's. Boyne's great imaginative generosity is to rescue, in fiction, a damaged reputation and let it live again, live anew." - Neel Mukherjee
"John Boyne is one of our best authors writing today. The Weight of Angels is wise, imaginative, funny, and extremely moving. Art and Life, Tragedy and Love, you'll find them all here in this rich and magnificent novel." - Tan Twan Eng
"A spectacularly cheeky piece of speculative fiction, gleefully celebrating the possibilities of queer genius, subversive influence and alternative history. It also shows Boyne channeling his own bruising experience of notoriety into a moving exploration of regret and rehabilitation." - Patrick Gale
"John Boyne confers a second immortality on Oscar Wilde in this counterfactual life of the writer. It is granularly imagined, witty, hugely pleasurable to read, and exceptionally moving. A great public wrong can ruin a life, as it did Wilde's. Boyne's great imaginative generosity is to rescue, in fiction, a damaged reputation and let it live again, live anew." - Neel Mukherjee
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