Tom Crewe

A brilliant and captivating debut, in the tradition of Alan Hollinghurst and Colm Tóibín, about two marriages, two forbidden love affairs, and the passionate search for social and sexual freedom in late 19th-century London. In this powerful, visceral novel about love, sex, and the struggle for a better world, two men collaborate on a book in defense of homosexuality, then a crime—risking their old lives in the process. In the summer of 1894, John Addington and Henry Ellis begin writing a book arguing that what they call “inversion,” or homosexuality, is a natural, harmless variation of human sexuality. Though they have never met, John and Henry both live in London with their wives, Catherine and Edith, and in each marriage there is a third party: John has a lover, a working class man named Frank, and Edith spends almost as much time with her friend Angelica as she does with Henry. John and Catherine have three grown daughters and a long, settled marriage, over the course of which Catherine has tried to accept her husband’s sexuality and her own role in life; Henry and Edith’s marriage is intended to be a revolution in itself, an intellectual partnership that dismantles the traditional understanding of what matrimony means. Shortly before the book is to be published, Oscar Wilde is arrested. John and Henry must decide whether to go on, risking social ostracism and imprisonment, or to give up the project for their own safety and the safety of the people they love. Is this the right moment to advance their cause? Is publishing bravery or foolishness? And what price is too high to pay for a new way of living? A richly detailed, insightful, and dramatic debut novel, The New Life is an unforgettable portrait of two men, a city, and a generation discovering the nature and limits of personal freedom as the 20th century comes into view.

A Novel

The New Life

It was a bright, warm day, the warmth as yet more suggestion than reality, the clear early-morning air feeling veined by it. . . It was an effect of the sunshine; everything was softly gazed at, not yet pinioned, borne down on—the shadows seemed depthless, accidental variants of the same easy light. Trees stirred awake. The occasional passersby, magnified in their isolation, walked less urgently, demanding less of life.

He did not need to speak once he discovered that he could write.

“. . . we must live in the future we hope to make.”

It threw a shadow across the simplicity of yesterday. 

He felt wondrously alive, like a marvelous secret kept and discovered by himself.

Words retreated. There was nothing for it.

“You have made a mania of your ideals.”

“Writing with more daring than I lived.”

[Henry] had a sense, hard to shake, that [Edith] was inhabiting a space grown larger around her, that somehow she had become smaller within it. He could only liken this to his memories of his father being away at sea: his perception, even as a small boy, that his mother felt the distances more keenly, from wall to wall, door to door, without her husband’s intervening presence.

The New Life quotes

Join the club