Imposture
From the 2025 Booker shortlisted author of The Rest of Our Lives
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- £6.49
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- £6.49
Publisher Description
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?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Markovits's latest (after 2005's Fathers and Daughters) is a masterful chronicle of a doomed 19th-century romance that begins in deception and ends in tragedy. Bookish Eliza Esmond, having forever lived in the shadow of her prettier sister, has a chance encounter with famed writer and legendary lover Lord Byron outside a London bookstore and is thrilled when their brief conversation turns, over time, into his pursuit of her. Unfortunately for Eliza, her Byron isn't the real Byron; he's John "Polly" Polidori, a bumbling doctor with literary aspirations who had worked as Lord Byron's personal physician. Even after Byron severed their relationship, Polly remained obsessed with the poet and went to absurd lengths offering up his sister, for one to keep Byron in his life. Polly maintains the charade, and his anonymously published and wildly popular story is believed by everyone including Eliza to be Byron's work. Markovitz is a remarkably economic writer who neatly conveys his characters' inner whirlwinds: "It was, for Polidori, a little like discovering, after an orphaned childhood, that your father had been a king, that you were a king, now, too." A powerful climax underscores the misery and longing at the core of this impressive novel.
