The Weight of Angels

Name: The Weight of Angels
Brand: Henry Holt & Company
SKU: 9781250411365
Price: 37.19 USD
Availability: InStock

$37.19

Product Variants

Biographical Note:
John Boyne is the author of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The Heart's Invisible Furies, and A Ladder to the Sky, among others. His most recent novel, The Elements, won both Le Prix Femina Étranger and the Prix du Roman Fnac in France. He lives in Dublin.

Review Quotes:

"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 besides."
--John Banville

"John Boyne is a maestro of historical fiction."
--John Irving

"One of the most assured novelists of his generation."
--The Guardian

"John Boyne brings a completely fresh eye to the most important stories. He is one of the great craftsmen in contemporary literature."
--Colum McCann

"Among the world's greatest storytellers."
--Donal Ryan

"John Boyne is one of our best authors writing today. The Weight of Angels is wise, imaginative, funny, and extremely moving."
--Tan Twan Eng

"Boyne delivers a witty alternate history of Oscar Wilde, who, instead of dying in 1900 at 46, enjoys an influential life of letters into the 1950s... The result is a wry masterpiece deserving of a standing ovation."
--Publishers Weekly (starred)

Publisher Marketing:

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.

Contributor Bio:Boyne, John
John Boyne is the author of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The Heart's Invisible Furies, A Ladder to the Sky, and The Elements, which won both Le Prix Femina Étranger and the Prix du Roman Fnac in France. He lives in Dublin.