The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts

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In this singularly powerful novel, bestselling author Louis Bayard brings Oscar Wildes wife Constance and two sons out from the shadows of history and creates a vivid and poignant story of secrets, loss, and love.

"Wonderfully researched, beautifully crafted, movingly told, The Wildes is a treasure to read."

Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less and Less Is Lost

"The Wildes is a marvel of tenderness, irony, heartbreak, and reclamation that demonstrates why Bayard is among the most essentialand most entertaininginterrogators of the past.

Anthony Marra, author of Mercury Pictures Presents and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

In September of 1892, Oscar Wilde and his family have retreated to the idyllic Norfolk countryside for a holiday. His wife, Constance, has every reason to be happy: two beautiful sons, her own work as an advocate for feminist causes, and a delightfully charming and affectionate husband and father to her children, who also happens to be the most sought-after author in England. But with the arrival of an unexpected houseguest, the aristocratic young poet Lord Alfred Douglas, Constance graduallyand then all at oncecomes to see that her husbands heart is elsewhere and that the growing intensity between the two men threatens the whole foundation of their lives.

The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts takes readers on the emotional journey of this family, moving from the Italian countryside, where Constance Wilde flees from the aftermath of Oscars imprisonment for homosexuality, to the trenches of World War I and an underground bar in Londons Soho, where Oscars sons Cyril and Vyvyan must both grapple with their fathers legacy. And in a brilliant feat of the imagination, act 5 reunites the entire cast in a surprising, poignant, and tremendously satisfying tableau.

With Louis Bayards trademark sparkling dialogue and deep insight into the lives and longings of all his characters, The Wildes could almost have been created by Oscar Wilde himself. Lightly told but with hidden depths, it is an entertaining and dramatic story about the human condition.