The Tragedy Of Arthur Arthur Phillips by Arthur Phillips 9780715642245, 0715642243 instant download after payment.

"The text of Arthur demonstrates that there are few limits to Mr Phillips's imagination."  -  Robert McCrum, The Guardian (UK)

Its doomed hero is Arthur Phillips, a young man struggling with a larger-than-life father, a con artist who works wonders of deception but is a most unreliable parent. Arthur is raised in an enchanted world of smoke and mirrors where the only unshifting truth is his father’s and his beloved twin sister’s deep and abiding love for the works of William Shakespeare - a love so pervasive that Arthur becomes a writer in a misguided bid for their approval and affection.

Years later, Arthur’s father, imprisoned for decades and nearing the end of his life, shares with Arthur a treasure he’s kept secret for half a century: a previously unknown play by Shakespeare, titled The Tragedy of Arthur. But Arthur and his sister also inherit their father’s mission: to see the play published and acknowledged as the Bard’s last great gift to humanity... Unless it’s their father’s last great con.

"A funny, sad, absurd, moving, and very, very smart book. I don't know if it's fiction or non-fiction or both or neither, and ultimately it's irrelevant." - James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces

By turns hilarious and haunting, this virtuosic novel captures the very essence of romantic and familial love and betrayal. The Tragedy of Arthur explores the tension between storytelling and truth-telling, the thirst for originality in all our lives, and the act of literary mythmaking, both now and four centuries ago, as the two Arthurs - Arthur the novelist and Arthur the ancient king - play out their individual but strangely intertwined fates.