Matthew Pearl

For a hundred years, loose copyright laws and a hungry reading public meant that books could be published without an author's permission with extraordinary ease. Authors gained fame but suffered financially. The literary pirates were known as bookaneers. On the eve of the twentieth century, a new international treaty is signed to stop this literary underground. On Samoa, a dying Robert Louis Stevenson labors over a new novel. The thought of one last...

Explores the little-known true story of the kidnapping of thirteen-year-old Jemima Boone, Daniel Boone's daughter, by a Cherokee-Shawnee raiding party and the ensuing battle with reverberations that nobody could predict.

"The year is 1870. Five years after a series of Dante-inspired killings disrupted Boston, a man is found murdered in the public gardens of London with an enormous stone around his neck etched with a verse from the Divine Comedy. When more mysterious murders erupt across the city, all in the style of the punishments Dante memorialized in Purgatory, poet Christina Rossetti fears her brother, the Dante-obsessed artist and writer Gabriel Rossetti, will...