num_pages: 368
description: A bold and captivating novel about love passion and ambition that imagines the muse of William Shakespeare and the tumultuous year they spend together. The year is 1590 and Queen Elizabeths Spanish Armada victory has done nothing to quell her brutal persecution of the English Catholics. Katharine de LIsle is living at Lufanwal Hall the manor of her uncle Sir Edward. Taught by her cherished uncle to read when a child Katharine is now a thirty-one-year-old widow. She has resigned herself to a life of reading and keeping company with her cousins and their children. But all that changes when the familys priest who had been performing Catholic services in secret is found murdered. Faced with threats of imprisonment and death Sir Edward is forced to flee the country leaving Katharine adrift in a household rife with turmoil. At this time of unrest a new schoolmaster arrives from Stratford a man named William Shakespeare. Coarse quick-witted and brazenly flirtatious Shakespeare swiftly disrupts what fragile peace there is left at Lufanwal. Katharine is at first appalled by the boldness of this new tutor but when she learns he is a poet and one of talent things between them begin to shift and soon Katharine finds herself drawn into Shakespeares verse and his life in ways that will change her forever. Inventive and absorbing The Tutor is a masterful work of historical fiction casting Shakespeare in a light weve never seen.
language: English
title: The Tutor
publisher: Riverhead Books