Doubleday to publish John Boyne’s ‘astonishing’ reimagining of Oscar Wilde’s life
Doubleday, an imprint of Transworld, is set to publish author John Boyne’s “astonishing” reimagining of the life of Oscar Wilde, The Weight of Angels. Publisher, Bill Scott-Kerr bought UK and Commonwealth rights (excluding North America, which went to Henry Holt) from Simon Trewin. The book is set for publication on 24th September 2026.
The book focuses on a turning point in Oscar Wilde’s life, on 28th February 1895, when he received a card from the ninth Marquess of Queensberry denouncing him as a “somdomite” [sic], in anger at the playwright’s relationship with his son, Lord Alfred, known as Bosie. Wilde sued the Marquess, but when the case was heard in court, it wasn’t the Marquess who found himself in the dock, but Wilde himself. Following the case, he was jailed, and by 1900 Wilde was living in penury in Paris, where he died alone at the age of 46.
Boyne’s book poses the question: “What if Oscar had chosen differently? What if he’d laughed off the insult and simply got on with his life? What then might have happened?” The book is set across seven decades and takes in crucial world events and features a multitude of real-life characters, from TS Eliot to Mickey Rooney, Virginia Woolf to Katharine Hepburn, and Emmeline Pankhurst to Winston Churchill.
Boyne said: “The speed of Oscar Wilde’s fall from grace, and how that led to his early death, has always struck me as one of the great tragedies in literary history. And it all came down to one bad decision: to sue a homophobic bully. It’s not always easy to turn the other cheek, but had he done so, he might have gone on to even greater things. That’s what I wanted to write about. The life, the work and, of course, the scandals that might have been.”
Scott-Kerr said: “Creating the life that Oscar Wilde might and, indeed, should have lived is a monumental task, but John has accomplished it magnificently. He has summoned an alternative biography of one of the great characters of our literary and cultural heritage, full of incident, joy and sadness, which puts Oscar at the heart of everything over the first half of the 21st century, right where he should have been. It is a feat of imaginative brilliance which will entertain and move his many readers, but also leave them with the sadness of what might have been.”
The Weight of Angels publishes in hardback, e-book and audio from Doubleday on 24th September 2026
