Böcker av Ardythe Ashley

To Murder and Create is an extraordinarily creative and engaging historical novel loosely structured around T. S. Eliot's paradigm-bending modernist poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Set in Boston of 1915, an array of eccentric and eminently charming tenants inhabit a boardinghouse sternly governed by a rule-bound yet likable landlady. They include the retired captain with a secret, the literary-minded cook, the spinster who has all but given up on love, two carpetbaggers who could have sprung from the pages of Mark Twain, the "confirmed bachelor" who stumbles into happiness, and the retired professor who is obsessed with his former student, T. S. Eliot. Star-crossed love, passion, jealousy, and courage take center stage in this captivating glimpse of an authentically rendered bygone world brimming with timeless questions of the heart and mind.

In 1900, penniless and disgraced, Oscar Wilde, one of the greatest playwrights of all time, dies in a hotel in Paris. Or so everyone believes. Secretly his unconscious body, still flickering with life, is spirited away by devoted friends to an island monastery in the Venetian lagoon where he recovers his health and joie de vivre. From there he begins a series of adventures that include Auguste Rodin, a romance with an English aristocrat, a new lover, a session with Sigmund Freud, and an heroic death. Ashley's meticulously researched and imaginative novel honors Wilde's life and unparalleled command of the English language by giving voice to a writer who continues to charm and fascinate readers and audiences to this day.