Book description
Boston. 1865. A small group of elite scholars prepares to introduce
Dante's vision of hell to America. But so does a murderer.
The literary geniuses of the Dante Club - poets and Harvard
professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr Oliver Wendell Holmes, James
Russell Lowell and publisher J. T. Fields - are finishing America's
first translation of The Divine Comedy. The powerful old guard of
Harvard College wants to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the
infiltration of such foreign superstitions will prove as corrupting as
the immigrants invading Boston Harbor. The members of the Dante Club
fight to keep their sacred literary cause alive, but their plans fall
apart when a series of murders erupts through Boston and Cambridge.
Only this small group of scholars realises that the gruesome killings
are modeled on the descriptions of Hell's punishments from Dante's
Inferno. With the police baffled, lives endangered and Dante's
literary future at stake, the Dante Club must shed its sheltered
literary existence and find a way to stop the killer.
Matthew Pearl is the internationally bestselling author of
The
Dante Club
, published in more than thirty languages and forty countries,
The
Poe Shadow
and, most recently,
The Last Dickens
. Pearl is a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School and has
taught literature at Harvard and at Emerson College.
