MATTHEW
PEARL
official
author website
Matthew Pearl's novels have been New York Times bestsellers and
international bestsellers translated into more than 30 languages. His
nonfiction writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street
Journal, the Boston Globe, and Slate.com. The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution writes that Pearl's books are part of "the
growing genre of novel being written nowadays -- the learned,
challenging kind that does not condescend." Globe and Mail
declares him "a writer of rare talents," Library Journal says
"Pearl has proven himself a master," and the New York Daily News
raves "if the past is indeed a foreign country, Matthew Pearl has your
passport." Pearl has been named one of The Next Big Things by Details
Magazine and was chosen Best Author for Boston Magazine's
2013 Best of Boston. He received the 2013 Massachusetts Book Award for
Fiction.
Please explore Matthew's books below and check out the upcoming tour dates to come say hi.
BOOKS
THE LAST BOOKANEER
Mystery, celebrity, theft – and a thrilling adventure set at the ends of the earth… On the island of Samoa, in a house perched on a cliff beneath a smoldering volcano, a dying Robert Louis Stevenson labours over a new novel. It is rumored that this may be the author of Treasure Island’s greatest masterpiece. On the other side of the world this news fires the imaginations of the bookaneers, literary pirates who steal the latest manuscripts by famous writers to smuggle them to a hungry public. But a changing world means the bookaneers will soon become extinct. Two adversaries set out for the south Pacific: Pen Davenport, a tortured criminal genius haunted by his past and Belial, his nemesis. Both dream of fortune and immortality with this last and most incredible heist.
Matthew Pearl's The Last Bookaneer delivers "literate thrills" (Library Journal) in the lost world of these doomed outlaws, with a tropical island with a violent destiny, a brewing colonial war and a reclusive genius directing events from high in his mountain compound.
COMPANY EIGHT
A work of narrative nonfiction. In the annals of American firefighting, the early 1800s were a dark time. Volunteer fire companies operated less as public servants and more as rival gangs: defying city regulations, extorting money from victims, sabotaging other companies to put out fires first, or letting them burn out of pure spite. Willard Sears, a Boston builder and abolitionist, set out to change all that, with a vision for a fire company that would bring professionalism to a field laced with corruption and violence—and gathered a ragtag group to follow him under the banner of Company Eight. Ultimately, Sears’ quest would pit him against the most powerful forces in the city, in a battle that would shape the future of firefighting in America.
Writer Matthew Pearl delves into historical archives to bring to life, for the first time, a true story of courage and persistence.
THE TECHNOLOGISTS
Boston, 1868. The Civil War may be over but a new war has begun,
one between the past and the present, tradition and technology. On a
former marshy wasteland, the daring Massachusetts Institute of
Technology is rising, its mission to harness science for the benefit
of all and to open the doors of opportunity to everyone of merit.
But in Boston Harbor a fiery cataclysm throws commerce into chaos,
as ships’ instruments spin inexplicably out of control. Soon after,
another mysterious catastrophe devastates the heart of the city. Is
it sabotage by scientific means or Nature revolting against man’s
attempt to control it?
The shocking disasters cast a pall over M.I.T. and provoke assaults
from all sides—rival Harvard, labor unions, and a sensationalistic
press. With their first graduation and the very survival of their
groundbreaking college now in doubt, a band of the Institute’s best
and brightest students secretly come together to save innocent lives
and track down the truth, armed with ingenuity and their unique
scientific training.
Studded with suspense and soaked in the rich historical atmosphere
for which its author is renowned, Matthew Pearl's The
Technologists (winner of the 2013 Massachusetts Book Award for
Fiction) is a dazzling journey into a dangerous world not so very
far from our own, as the America we know today begins to shimmer
into being.
THE LAST DICKENS
With The Last Dickens, Matthew Pearl reopens one of literary history’s greatest mysteries.
Boston, 1870. When news of Charles Dickens’s untimely death reaches the office of his struggling American publisher, Fields & Osgood, partner James Osgood sends his trusted clerk Daniel Sand to await Dickens’s unfinished novel–The Mystery of Edwin Drood. But when Daniel’s body is discovered by the docks and the manuscript is nowhere to be found, Osgood must embark on a transatlantic quest to unearth the novel that will save his venerable business and reveal Daniel’s killer. As they attempt to uncover Dickens’s final mystery, Osgood and his partner-in-adventure Rebecca find themselves racing the clock through a dangerous web of literary lions and drug dealers, sadistic thugs and blue bloods, and competing members of the inner circle. They soon realize that understanding Dickens’s lost ending is a matter of life and death, and the hidden key to stopping a murderous mastermind. The resulting twists and turns are "well-executed and tightly controlled" (The Los Angeles Times) that "ensures excitement" (London Daily Mail).
THE POE SHADOW
The body of Edgar Allan Poe has been buried in an unmarked grave. The public, the press, even Poe's own family and friends accept the conclusion that Poe was a second-rate writer who met a disgraceful end as a drunkard. But none of this deters a young Baltimore lawyer named Quentin Clark. Quentin, an ardent admirer, discovers that Poe's last days are riddled with vital unanswered questions - that the police may be covering up. Just when Poe's death seems destined to remain a mystery, inspiration strikes - in the form of Poe's own stories. Quentin realizes he must find the one person who can solve the strange case of Poe's death: the real-life model for Poe's brilliant fictional detective character, C. Auguste Dupin, the hero of Poe's tales of crime and detection.
In The Poe Shadow, Matthew Pearl has once again crossed pitch-perfect literary history with innovative mystery to create a beautifully detailed, ingeniously plotted tale of suspense that The Globe and Mail calls "a masterpiece" and that Bookpage says "would make Poe himself proud."
THE DANTE CLUB
1865
Boston, a small group of literary geniuses puts the finishing
touches on America’s first translation of The Divine
Comedy and prepares to unveil the remarkable visions of
Dante to the New World. The powerful old guard of Harvard
College wants to keep Dante out—believing that the
infiltration of such foreign superstitions onto our
bookshelves would prove as corrupting as the foreign
immigrants invading Boston harbor. The members of the Dante
Club—poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell and publisher
J. T. Fields —endure the intimidation of their fellow Boston
Brahmins for a sacred literary cause, an endeavor that has
sustained Longfellow in the hellish aftermath of his wife’s
tragic death by fire.
But the plans of the Dante Club come to a screeching halt when a series of murders erupts through Boston and Cambridge. Only the members of the Dante Club realize that the style and form of the killings are stolen directly from Dante’s Inferno and its singular account of Hell’s punishments. With the police baffled, lives endangered and Dante’s literary future at stake, the Dante Club must shed its sheltered literary existence and find a way to stop the killer.
Hailed by Esquire as "audacious and captivating" and by The Boston Globe as "a preternaturally accomplished book as wise as it is entertaining," The Dante Club was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the year's 25 Books to Remember
MEET/CONTACT
Meet Matthew on THE LAST BOOKANEER book tour! Friday 5/1/2015: BOSTON, MA—Harvard Bookstore, 7pm... Monday 5/4/2015: SEATTLE, WA—Elliott Bay, 7pm... Tuesday 5/5/2015: LOS ANGELES, CA—Vroman’s, 7pm... Wednesday 5/6/2015: SAN DIEGO, CA—Warwick’s, 7:30pm... Thursday 5/7/2015: DANVILLE, CA—Rakestraw Books, 7pm... Friday 5/8/2015: CORTE MADERA, CA—Book Passage, 7pm... Monday 5/11/2015: HOUSTON, TX—Murder by the Book, 7pm... Tuesday 5/12/2015: ST. LOUIS, MO—Left Bank Books, 7pm... Wednesday 5/13/2015: NAPERVILLE, IL—Anderson’s Bookshop, 7pm... Thursday 5/14/2015: CINCINNATI, OH—Joseph-Beth Booksellers, 7pm
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