The average life is made up of millions of moments, some memorable, many forgettable, but occasionally it’s defined by a single one.

For Oscar Wilde, such a moment came on February 28th, 1895, when he received a card from the ninth Marquess of Queensberry denouncing him as a ‘somdomite’ [sic], in anger at the playwright’s relationship with his son, Lord Alfred, known as Bosie. Showing the note to friends that night, they encouraged him to sue. When the case was heard in court, however, it wasn’t the Marquess who found himself in the dock, but Oscar himself. Disgrace, ignominy and jail followed, and by 1900 he was living in penury in Paris, where he died alone at the age of forty-six.

But what if Oscar had chosen differently? What if he’d laughed off the insult and simply got on with his life? What then might have happened?

Set across seven decades, the novel takes in crucial world events and features a multitude of real-life characters, from TS Eliot to Mickey Rooney, Virginia Woolf to Katharine Hepburn, and Emmeline Pankhurst to Winston Churchill.

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