Benjamin Markovits

Three years after Lord Byron dismissed him from his service, Dr John Polidori has fallen on hard times. And then a young woman mistakes the doctor for the poet. As the pair fall in love, Polidori knows that he can only emerge from Byron's shadow if he confesses his true identity to the deluded girl; but was it only Byron's shadow that led her to love him in the first place? And a ghost story, The Vampyre, is published under Byron's name, but will the truth of the matter be uncovered?

Lord Byron was the greatest writer and most notorious, scandalous lover of his age an irresistible attraction for a sheltered, bookish, and passionate young woman like Eliza Esmond. Eliza believes she's met Byron on the doorstep of his publisher, and that her dreams have come true when he arranges to meet her in secret. But what if the man she believes to be Byron is someone else a look-alike named John Polidori, who once toured Europe as Byron's doctor? And if Polidori is the true author of a wildly successful book everyone believes to have been written by Byron, who is the real imposter? Stylish, subtle, and seductive, "Imposture" is about ambition, fantasy, the power of artistic greatness, and the consequences of celebrity by a gifted novelist of true talent. Reading group guide available."

'Human, astonishing, superb; and sublime.' Guardian 'A formidable voice . . . the bastard son of Philip Roth and A. S. Byatt.' New Statesman 'A remarkable achievement.' Observer Taking place over the course of one year, shifting between uptown Manhattan and a private high-school campus in Riverdale, Either Side of Winter moves season by season through that richest of cityscapes, offering a deeply moving picture of people whose lives are linked by circumstance, community - and the need to be loved.

Douglas Pitt is a man obsessed. Laughed at, mocked and dismissed at every turn, Pitt has spent the best part of an unremarkable academic career attempting to prove the genius of Samuel Highgate Syme (b 1794, Baltimore; soldier, geologist, inventor). After years of frustration, Pitt finally stumbles into the good fortune he hopes will make his name: he uncovers a manuscript written by a fledgling scientist which recounts a year in the company of the irrespresible Syme. Teeming with comic detail and fierce intelligence, The Syme Papers recreates a time when to question the world and the origin of creation was the greatest project a scientist could undertake. It is a novel of genius and failure; of a man who thought he could prove the world was hollow, and in the glorious process of discover, broke his own heart.