"The Wildes"

In the words of the New York Times, Louis Bayard “reinvigorates historical fiction,” rendering the past “as if he’d witnessed it firsthand.”

His acclaimed novels include The Pale Blue Eye, adapted into the global #1 Netflix release starring Christian Bale, Jackie & Me, ranked by the Washington Post as one of the top novels of 2022, the national bestseller Courting Mr. Lincoln, Roosevelt's Beast, The School of Night, The Black Tower, and Mr. Timothy, as well as the highly praised young-adult novel, Lucky Strikes.

His reviews and articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Salon, and he is a contributing writer to the Washington Post Book World.

A former instructor at George Washington University, he was the chair of the PEN/Faulkner Awards and the author of the popular Downton Abbey recaps for the New York Times. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Bayard applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Wildes, and reported the following:

Well, what do you know? Page 69 turns out to be a pretty seminal moment in The Wildes. (Feeling guilty about that adjective.) Constance Wilde is beginning to sense that something strange is going on between her husband Oscar and their holiday guest, the beautiful and mercurial Lord Alfred Douglas. In something like distress, she says to Oscar: “I only wonder sometimes what would happen if something went wrong—I mean really desperately wrong….I wonder if you’d tell me or just—leave me to piece it all together—without knowing exactly what I’m piecing….”

Oscar reassures her by insisting that they are still a happy couple in a “perfectly dire state of bliss” and that it is all her doing. Because of this holiday, he says, he is now a “gloriously rejuvenated specimen.” More than that, he adds, he is “a new man.”

A new man. That is the double-edged sword of the book’s entire first act. Oscar belatedly recognizing who he is sexually and emotionally – and finding in Lord Alfred the lover he has been seeking all his life without knowing it – while Constance remains on the outside, not yet grasping whom her husband has become.

Learn more about the book and author at Louis Bayard's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Black Tower.

The Page 69 Test: The Pale Blue Eye.

The Page 69 Test: The School of Night.

The Page 69 Test: Roosevelt's Beast.

The Page 69 Test: Jackie & Me.

--Marshal Zeringue