"This debut novel reimagines the real-life efforts of two researchers who advocated for acceptance of homosexuality in the 1800s, decades before the gay rights movement. In exploring their story, Crewe asks: What's worth jeopardizing in the name of progress?" -The New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice "In The New Life, Crewe distinguishes himself both as novelist and as historian... He has, more unusually, found a prose that can accommodate everything from the lofty to the romantic and the shamelessly sexy." -The New Yorker "Intricate and finely crafted... [Crewe] attentively constructs rich, human motivations and contradictions for his fictionalized renderings of John and Henry... The New Life brims with intelligence and insight, impressed with all the texture (and fog) of fin de siècle London." -The New York Times "The spirit of Forster broods over Tom Crewe's lyrical, piercing debut, The New Life, which lends a contemporary urgency to an exploration of same-sex intimacy and social opprobrium... The New Life is a fine-cut gem, its sentences buffed to a gleam, but with troubling implications for our own reactionary era." -The Washington Post "A literary debut that's nothing less than remarkable... Crewe's writing is subtly intricate, gorgeous, though never precious or showy' at times, it calls to mind the best of Thomas Hardy, but with necessarily modern sensibilities... This is a beautiful, brave book that reminds us of the terrible human cost of bigotry; this is a novel against forgetting." -The Boston Globe "One of the most embodied historical novels I have read ... Crewe's brilliance - in addition to his ability to make us feel the physical sensations - is in dramatising moral dilemmas with complexity and rigour ... Lives and experience demand richer forms of storytelling, and this is just what Crewe has given us." -The Guardian "A novel that promises to scrape back the polished veneer of late 19th-century England." -Daily Mail "Tom Crewe's book is a beautiful, haunting portrait of love in a time that didn't understand it, and a reminder of how close we are to the past." -Town & Country, 30 Must-Read Books for Winter 2023
