The Forger's Requiem

‘Like the love child of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle . . . delightful to read.’—NPR.org, on The Forgers

A gripping literary thriller that brings readers inside the world of expert forgery, rivalrous fury, and generations of dark family secrets, with Mary Shelley’s voice and life woven throughout

Literary forger Henry Slader, assaulted and presumed dead by his longtime nemesis, Will, awakens in a shallow grave, suffocating in dirt. Concussed and disoriented, Slader exhumes himself and sets out to exact revenge on his rival, orchestrate Will’s downfall, and make a fortune along the way—armed with a devastating secret about Will’s past.


Slader quickly draws in Will’s daughter, Nicole, wielding his threats against her father to blackmail her into forging inscriptions by such authors as Poe, Hemingway, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. As Nicole’s skill grows, so does her devotion to—and doubts about—her father’s integrity, until she commits the ultimate betrayal for the sake of his freedom. With breathtakingly precise background knowledge and virtuoso execution, Nicole forges a suite of brilliantly convincing and surpassingly valuable letters by Frankenstein author Mary Shelley—planting within them the seeds of Slader’s doom.

Moving between upstate New York, a village in Ireland, London, and ending in a shocking standoff at the site of Mary Shelley’s grave in a coastal town in Southern England, The Forger’s Requiem is both a compelling standalone novel and the crescendo ending to the trilogy Joyce Carol Oates has called ‘lethally enthralling to read.’


Genre: Mystery

"How fitting that the central literary object in Bradford Morrow's new novel, The Forger's Daughter, is a rare work of Edgar Allan Poe. Morrow has long been a master of the literary novel. But with his two forger novels, like Poe himself Morrow has secured his high and enduring place in our cultural landscape in part by demonstrating the deep thematic and aesthetic connectedness of compelling mystery and serious literature. This book will race the pulse and nourish the mind in a dazzlingly seamless way. Morrow's brilliance is unforgeable." - Robert Olen Butler

"Most sequels end up feeling like a pale shadow of their originals, but this one's more like a long-lost twin: unexpected and differently scary. The Forger's Daughter is a fully-formed and satisfying complication of the problems in The Forgers, a morally complex look at the way we forge the bonds of family and friendship, and the very real way in which these bonds are, in a sense, forgeries. This is a book about both what we hide and what we agree not to look at too closely so as to be able to go on living not only with those around us, but with ourselves." - Brian Evenson