The Weight of Angels

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Can one rash decision prove the difference between a life well lived and a life destroyed?

When the Marquis of Queensbury left his calling card at the Albemarle Club in February 1895, it bore only his name and five words: ‘For Oscar Wilde, posing Somdomite’. The most feted playwright of his day famously sued for libel, which led to his arrest, criminal prosecution and imprisonment. From then on, his gilded existence spiralled into public disgrace, humiliation and an early death.

But what if he had simply ignored the insult?

Rather than dying impoverished in Paris at the age of forty-six, what if he had lived to bear witness to the momentous events and cataclysmic changes at the start of the twentieth century, and even influence some of them? What if the second half of his life were as celebrated, dramatic and tumultuous as the first?

Like Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet and Percival Everett's James, John Boyne explores one of the great what-if stories of modern literature, giving the great Anglo-Irish playwright an opportunity to take an entirely different path.

© John Boyne 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026