TITLE: Chasing Shakespeares
AUTHOR: Sarah Smith
BINDING: Hardcover, with Dust Jacket
PUBLICATION DETAILS:
Published by ATRIA Books (New York)
Copyright 2003 by Sarah Smith
First Edition, First Printing
ISBN: 9780743464826
Signed Collectible First Edition, First Printing
CONDITION: Signed and inscribed “Shakespeare forever!” with a sketch of the bard’s iconic face on the inside pages. Book is in “Very Good” condition, in very good unclipped pictorial dustjacket, light rub to surface and along edges; crease around front top flap-fold; some rub marks to head and tail caps, remainder mark to bottom text block, also some dust; otherwise pages are clean and unmarked; spine is solid, binding tight. A black streak can also be found at the bottom of the book.
5 ¾" x 8 ¾" – 337 pages.
SYNOPSIS (FROM DUST JACKET):
From an author the "San Francisco Chronicle" hails as "daring and splendid" comes an exhilarating novel of passion and ideas that cuts to the heart of one of literature's most fascinating and enduring mysteries: the enigma of Shakespeare.
Meet Joe Roper, tough-minded young graduate student, who has been lucky enough to land a job cataloging the famed Kellogg Collection of Elizabethan texts and curiosities. Joe's been passionate about Shakespeare since he read a duct-taped paperback at age nine and found the witches, warriors, murders, and ghosts as much fun as Stephen King, but his working-class roots make him a fish out of water in the academic world. He is seemingly as far from adventure as it's possible to be -- until the delicious Posy Gould enters, stage right.
A glamorous rising star at Harvard, she insists that a letter Joe has found, signed by one W. Shakespeare of Stratford, is a career-making discovery for them both -- because the letter says Shakespeare didn't write the plays.
To Joe's mind, the letter is a forgery. When Posy insists they test it, the two literary sleuths head for England to prove their clashing theories. But they find themselves in a world where the London Eye looks out over Shakespeare's city, Hollywood producers rub elbows with Elizabethan spies, and mystery shadows the heart of Westminster Abbey and the lanes of rural England. And Joe and Posy find that, when you start chasing Shakespeares, what you find is not only who he was, but who you are, and how far you're willing to go....
A first-rate mystery from one of the masters of the genre, "Chasing Shakespeares" is also a literary shell game, a love story, and a profound meditation on identityand ownership. Sarah Smith has created a novel that rivals A. S. Byatt's “Possession” in its rich and fast-moving blend of literary history and page-turning suspense
