The release date for the English version of 'The Dante Club' by
Matthew Pearl is Jun 2006. If you enjoy this novel, it is available for buy as a paperback from Barnes & Noble or Indigo, as an ebook on the Amazon Kindle store, or as an audiobook on Audible.
A masterful fusion of fiction and truth, a masterfully executed ode to Dante's enduring power over our imagination, and an engrossing mystery that keeps readers guessing right up to the very end.
Words have the power to hurt.
The Dante Club, composed of Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as well as publisher J. T. Fields, is in Boston in 1865, finishing the first translation of The Divine Comedy into English and getting ready to present Dante's amazing visions to the New World. At Harvard College, the influential Boston Brahmins are battling to keep Dante hidden because they think that foreign beliefs creeping into American culture would be just as damaging as the immigrants coming into Boston Harbor.
The Dante Club members struggle to preserve a noble literary cause, but as a string of killings breaks out in Cambridge and Boston, their schemes come crashing down. The fact that the horrific murders are based on Dante's Inferno's depiction of Hell's punishments is only known to this exclusive group of academics. The Dante Club members need to uncover the murderer before the police find out about their secret since the lives of the Boston elite are in jeopardy, as is Dante's literary career in America.
To put a stop to the horror, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Nicholas Rey, an outcast police officer and the first black member of the Boston police force, must risk losing their professions. Together, they learn that the killings' source is far closer to home than they had anticipated.
The Dante Club is a brilliant thriller that will astonish readers from start to finish, a masterful fusion of reality and fiction, and a masterfully realized ode to Dante's enduring hold on our imagination.