> Skip to content
[]
  • Published: 9 April 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529919714
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $28.00

The New Life




'We must live in the future we hope to make': a magnificent and daring novel of forbidden love and new ways of living set in 1890s London

Discover Tom Crewe's magnificent debut novel about forbidden desire and the search for freedom in Victorian England...

'Beautifully written' Graham Norton
'Subtle, sexy and beautifully crafted' Sarah Waters
'Lavishly imagined' Sunday Times
______________

After a lifetime spent navigating his desires, John has finally found a man who returns his feelings. Meanwhile, Henry is convinced that his new unconventional marriage will bring freedom.

United by a shared vision, they begin work on a revolutionary book arguing for the legalisation of homosexuality.

Before it can be published however, Oscar Wilde is arrested and their daring book threatens to throw them, and all around them, into danger. How high a price are they willing to pay for a new way of living?
______________

'A very fine new writer' Kate Atkinson
'I loved this book' Zadie Smith
'Some of the best writing on desire I've read' Douglas Stuart
'Extraordinary' Jonathan Bailey
'Filled with nuance and tenderness . . . charting the lives of men and women who inspired not only political progress but an entire new way of living and loving' Colm Tóibín

  • Published: 9 April 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529919714
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $28.00

About the author

Tom Crewe

TOM CREWE was born in Middlesbrough in 1989. He has a PhD in nineteenth century British history from the University of Cambridge. Since 2015, he has been an editor at the London Review of Books, to which he contributes essays on politics, art, history and fiction. The New Life is his first novel. Crewe says: 'This is the book I knew I wanted to write long before I actually wrote it. I hope it reveals to readers an unfamiliar Victorian England that will surprise and provoke, inhabited by a generation in the process of discovering the nature and limits of personal freedom, struggling to create a better world as the twentieth century comes into view.'

Also by Tom Crewe

See all