by Jodi Picoult
First published 2024
Playwright Melina Green has written a new play about her Elizabethan ancestor Emilia Bassano, but the theater world remains hostile to women writers. Her best friend submits the work to a festival using a male name without telling her. Four centuries earlier, Emilia Bassano lives as a ward of English aristocrats in 1581. Her education in languages and writing has given her talent for storytelling, but women have no public voice. When she becomes the Lord Chamberlain's mistress, she watches how playwrights move audiences. Emilia devises a plan to see her own work performed by paying an actor named William Shakespeare to present her plays as his own. The two women's stories unfold together across time, each fighting prejudice to bring her words to life. Both face the same question: what price will they pay to make their stories survive?
Genres: drama, literary-fiction, historical-fiction, feminism
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, found-family
Setting: England, London
Period: 1581, 21st-century
525 pages · Hardcover · Ballantine Books