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  • Published: 1 November 2016
  • ISBN: 9781681370521
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 128

The New Life




'We must live in the future we hope to make': a magnificent and daring novel of forbidden love and new ways of living set in 1890s London

The New Life is the masterpiece of Dante’s youth, an account of his love for Beatrice, the girl who was to become his lifelong muse, and of her tragic early death. An allegory of the soul’s crisis and growth, combining prose and poetry, narrative and meditation, dreams and songs and prayers, The New Life is a work of crystalline beauty and fascinating complexity that has long taken its place as one of the supreme revelations in the literature of love.  

The New Life is published here in the beautiful translation by the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, an inspired poetic re-creation comparable to Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and a classic in its own right.

  • Published: 1 November 2016
  • ISBN: 9781681370521
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 128

About the author

Tom Crewe

TOM CREWE was born in Middlesbrough in 1989. He has a PhD in nineteenth century British history from the University of Cambridge. Since 2015, he has been an editor at the London Review of Books, to which he contributes essays on politics, art, history and fiction. The New Life is his first novel. Crewe says: 'This is the book I knew I wanted to write long before I actually wrote it. I hope it reveals to readers an unfamiliar Victorian England that will surprise and provoke, inhabited by a generation in the process of discovering the nature and limits of personal freedom, struggling to create a better world as the twentieth century comes into view.'

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