“The Tragedy of Arthur is an emotional and
elaborately constructed tour de force from bestselling and critically acclaimed
novelist Arthur Phillips, “one of the best writers in America” (The
Washington Post). Its doomed hero is Arthur Phillips, a young man struggling
with a larger-than-life father, a con artist who works wonders of deception but
is a most unreliable parent. Arthur is raised in an enchanted world of smoke
and mirrors where the only unshifting truth is his father’s and his beloved
twin sister’s deep and abiding love for the works of William Shakespeare—a love
so pervasive that Arthur becomes a writer in a misguided bid for their approval
and affection. Years later, Arthur’s father, imprisoned for decades and nearing
the end of his life, shares with Arthur a treasure he’s kept secret for half a
century: a previously unknown play by Shakespeare, titled The Tragedy of
Arthur. But Arthur and his sister also inherit their father’s mission: to see
the play published and acknowledged as the Bard’s last great gift to humanity.
. . . Unless it’s their father’s last great con. By turns hilarious and
haunting, this virtuosic novel—which includes Shakespeare’s (?) lost King
Arthur play in its five-act entirety—captures the very essence of romantic and
familial love and betrayal. The Tragedy of Arthur explores the tension between
storytelling and truth-telling, the thirst for originality in all our lives,
and the act of literary mythmaking, both now and four centuries ago, as the two
Arthurs—Arthur the novelist and Arthur the ancient king—play out their
individual but strangely intertwined fates.”
