The New Life

BOOK SUMMARY

Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger, the Sunday Times Young Writer Award, the Betty Trask Prize, and the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature • Named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and The Times (London) • The Sunday Times (London) novel of the year • Shortlisted for the 2023 Nero Book Award for Debut Fiction, the Polari Prize, and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction • Selected for Kirkus Reviews's best fiction books of the year. A captivating and "remarkable" (The Boston Globe) debut that "brims with intelligence and insight" (The New York Times), about two marriages, two forbidden love affairs, and the passionate search for social and sexual freedom in late 19th-century London.

In the summer of 1894, John Addington and Henry Ellis begin writing a book arguing that homosexuality, which is a crime at the time, is a natural, harmless variation of human sexuality. Though they have never met, John and Henry both live in Victorian London with their wives, Catherine and Edith, and in each marriage, there is a third party: John has a lover, a working-class man named Frank, and Edith spends almost as much time with her friend Angelica as she does with Henry. John and Catherine have three grown daughters and a long, settled marriage, over the course of which Catherine has tried to accept her husband's sexuality and her own role in life; Henry and Edith's marriage is intended to be a revolution in itself, an intellectual partnership that dismantles the traditional understanding of what matrimony means.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom Crewe was born in Middlesbrough in 1989. He has a PhD in 19th-century British history from the University of Cambridge. Since 2015, he has been an editor at the London Review of Books, to which he has contributed more than thirty essays on politics, art, history, and fiction. The New Life is his first novel.

PRAISE

"This debut novel reimagines the real-life efforts of two researchers who advocated for acceptance of homosexuality in the 1800s, decades before the gay rights movement. In exploring their story, Crewe asks: What's worth jeopardizing in the name of progress?"—The New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice

"In The New Life, Crewe distinguishes himself both as novelist and as historian... He has, more unusually, found a prose that can accommodate everything from the lofty to the romantic and the shamelessly sexy."—The New Yorker

"Rothian...a tour de force of writing"—The New York Review of Books

PRODUCT INFORMATION

Trade paperback
416 pages
Fiction
8 in H | 5.3 in W | 1 in T | 0.7 lb