Allison Epstein

Christopher Marlowe, a brilliant aspiring playwright, is pulled into the duplicitous world of international espionage on behalf of queen and country. A many-layered Elizabethan thriller combining state secrets, intrigue, and romance worthy of Marlowe's own timeless works. England, 1585. In Kit Marlowe's last year at Cambridge, he receives an unexpected visitor: Queen Elizabeth's spymaster, who has come with an unorthodox career opportunity. Her Majesty's spies are in need of new recruits, and Kit's flexible moral compass has drawn their attention. Kit, a scholarship student without money or prospects, accepts the offer, and after his training the game is on. Kit is dispatched to the chilly manor where Mary, Queen of Scots is under house arrest, to act as a servant in her household and keep his ear to the ground for a Catholic plot to put Mary on the throne. While observing Mary, Kit learns more than he bargained for. The ripple effects of his service to the Crown are far-reaching and leave Kit a changed man. But there are benefits as well. The salary he earns through his spywork allows him to mount his first play, and over the following years, he becomes the toast of London's raucous theatre scene. But when Kit finds himself reluctantly drawn back into the uncertain world of espionage, conspiracy, and high treason, he realizes everything he's worked so hard to attain--including the trust of the man he loves--could vanish before his very eyes. Pairing modern language with period detail, Allison Epstein brings Elizabeth's privy council, Marlowe's lovable theatre troupe, and the squalor of sixteenth-century London to vivid, teeming life as Kit wends his way behind the scenes of some of Tudor history's most memorable moments. At the center of the action is Kit himself--an irrepressible, irreverent force of nature. Thrillingly written, full of poetry and danger, A Tip for the Hangman brings an unforgettable protagonist to new life, and makes a centuries-old story feel utterly contemporary.

A Novel of Christopher Marlowe

A Tip for the Hangman

Let the Dead Bury the Dead

Kristen Loesch

Josefa Corpuz

Carolyn Janecek

Rama Santa Mansa

Jennifer Falkner

Timeworn is a biannual literary journal based in Buffalo, NY, focused on historical fiction with a splash of the speculative.

Issue 3

Timeworn Literary Journal

Returning home to Saint Petersburg a wounded veteran of the Napoleonic Wars of 1812, Mikhail Vostokov arrived at his childhood home, expecting a warm homecoming from the family who adopted him as an infant. He hoped to find Natalya Ivanovna, his fiancée in all but name, waiting for him, and for everything to return to the way it had been before he had left thirteen months before. Of course, hopes are one thing, and reality is entirely another. He had thought that the war had been enough. Little did he know that peace was no easier to navigate, and twice as difficult to hold.A swirling, comprehensive tour of 1812 Saint Petersburg, Na Zdarov'ye takes the reader by the hand through a world of love and betrayal, poverty and hope, ballrooms and dancing bears. Allison Epstein's first novel takes up the seemingly unanswerable questions of the strength of love, the rigidity of social class, and what happens when vodka, street performing, and a raging blizzard are mixed.

Na Zdarov'ye

Allison Epstein

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