Publication date is January 14, 2025. Available for preorder now!
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We all die alive. That’s what the earth said. Or so the buried man thought as he coughed into consciousness, unable to breathe or move…. A pitiful moan caught in his throat, muffled by the heavy shroud of earth that encased him. When he tried to scream, his screams were just the ideas of screams.”
So begins The Forger’s Requiem, the concluding novel of the Forger’s trilogy, which began with The Forgers (2014) and The Forger’s Daughter (2020). A standalone work, Requiem is 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, her devotion to her father is undermined by doubts about his integrity, leading her to commit 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."