“Like the love child of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle . . . delightful to read.”—NPR, on The Forgers A gripping literary thriller that brings readers inside the world of expert forgery, rivalrous fury, and generations of dark family secrets, with Mary Shelley’s voice and life woven throughout Literary forger Henry Slader, assaulted and presumed dead by his longtime nemesis, Will, awakens in a shallow grave, suffocating in dirt. Concussed and disoriented, Slader exhumes himself and sets out to exact revenge on his rival, orchestrate Will’s downfall, and make a fortune along the way—armed with a devastating secret about Will’s past. Slader quickly draws in Will’s daughter, Nicole, wielding his threats against her father to blackmail her into forging inscriptions by such authors as Poe, Hemingway, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. As Nicole’s skill grows, so does her devotion to—and doubts about—her father’s integrity, until she commits the ultimate betrayal for the sake of his freedom. With breathtakingly precise background knowledge and virtuoso execution, Nicole forges a suite of brilliantly convincing and surpassingly valuable letters by Frankenstein author Mary Shelley—planting within them the seeds of Slader’s doom. Moving between upstate New York, a village in Ireland, London, and ending in a shocking standoff at the site of Mary Shelley’s grave in a coastal town in Southern England, The Forger’s Requiem is both a compelling standalone novel and the crescendo ending to the trilogy Joyce Carol Oates has called “lethally enthralling to read.”
Author
Bradford Morrow has lived for the past thirty years in New York City and rural upstate New York, though he grew up in Colorado and lived and worked in a variety of places in between. While in his mid-teens, he traveled through rural Honduras as a member of the Amigos de las Americas program, serving as a medical volunteer in the summer of 1967. The following year he was awarded an American Field Service scholarship to finish his last year of high school as a foreign exchange student at a Liceo Scientifico in Cuneo, Italy. In 1973, he took time off from studying at the University of Colorado to live in Paris for a year. After doing graduate work on a Danforth Fellowship at Yale University, he moved to Santa Barbara, California, to work as a rare book dealer. In 1981 he relocated to New York City to the literary journal Conjunctions, which he founded with the poet Kenneth Rexroth, and to write novels. He and his two cats divide their time between NYC and upstate New York. Visit his website at www.bradfordmorrow.com.
