num_pages: 352
description: What about the most valuable relic in the history of English literaturewould that be worth killing for?Hay-on-Wye 1995. Peter Byerly isn't sure what drew him into this particular bookshop. Nine months earlier the death of his beloved wife Amanda had left him shattered. The young antiquarian bookseller relocated from North Carolina to the English countryside hoping to rediscover the joy he once took in collecting and restoring rare books. But upon opening an eighteenth-century study of Shakespeare forgeries Peter is shocked when a portrait of Amanda tumbles out of its pages. Of course it isn't really her. The watercolor is clearly Victorian. Yet the resemblance is uncanny and Peter becomes obsessed with learning the picture's origins. As he follows the trail back first to the Victorian era and then to Shakespeare's time Peter communes with Amanda's spirit learns the truth about his own past and discovers a book that might definitively prove Shakespeare was indeed the author of all his plays.
language: English
title: The Bookman’s Tale
publisher: Viking