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Also by Arthur Phillips:

The Tragedy of Arthur, April 2011
Hardcover
The Song Is You: A Novel, April 2009
Hardcover

THE TRAGEDY OF ARTHUR
By: Arthur Phillips

Random House
April 2011
On Sale: April 19, 2011
384 pages
ISBN: 1400066476
EAN: 9781400066476
Hardcover
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Fiction

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.

By turns hilarious and haunting, this virtuosic novel—which includes Shakespeare’s (?) lost King Arthur play in its five-act entirety—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.

Media Buzz

On Point - December 15, 2011
NPR Books - August 17, 2011
Studio 360 - May 15, 2011
Studio 360 - May 8, 2011
Weekend Edition Saturday - April 23, 2011