Four Winds Press
PROJECT DETAILS
Category: Biography/Fiction
Release Date: May 2025
Print Length: 184 pages
Trim Size: 5.5" x 8.5"
FORMATS
Paperback, $17.95
ISBN: 978-1-94023-21-0
Ebook, $9.99
ISBN: 978-1-94023-22-7
ABOUT THE BOOK
On the trail of an enigma...
While a student at Oxford, Oscar Wilde was courting a beautiful Dublin girl, Florence Balcombe, and on Christmas Day 1876 he presented her with a golden crucifix. Two years later, Florence surprised Oscar by suddenly marrying another young writer from Dublin, Bram Stoker, the future author of Dracula.
Dutch writer Maarten Asscher uses that crucifix as a fulcrum to examine Wilde’s early development as an artist, from a seminal trip to Greece to his whirlwind tour of America, including real-life encounters with Walt Whitman and Arthur Conan Doyle. Asscher draws on the complete panoply of Wilde scholarship to supplement historical fact with imaginative reconstruction, including a myth-busting account of Wilde’s deathbed in Paris, and a fictional solution to the mystery of the crucifix delivered by none other than Sherlock Holmes. The result is a convincing and original interpretation of Victorian history, and a literary tour de force.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maarten Asscher
Maarten Asscher studied law and Assyriology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He started his career in literary publishing in 1980 and became the Dutch publisher of writers such as Carlos Fuentes, Primo Levi, Amos Oz, James Salter and Wisława Szymborska. In 2004, after six years as a cultural policy advisor at the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, he went on to become director and co-owner of the Athenaeum Bookshop in Amsterdam. In 2018 he decided to devote his energy fulltime to writing and to translating poetry.
From 1992 onwards he published novels, short stories and novellas, and several books of essays. In 2015 he obtained a PhD in comparative literature with a dissertation on imprisonment as a literary experience. Most of his books have also appeared in German translation. He has translated poetry by Paul Valéry, Albrecht Haushofer, and Fernando Pessoa and produced a Dutch translation of Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
Maarten Asscher is married and lives in Amsterdam. He has three adult daughters.
ALSO BY MAARTEN ASSCHER: Apples & Oranges: In Praise of Comparison
