One of the most accomplished literary artists of our time, John Crowley has given us fiction that illuminates and astounds — from the wonder and whimsy of Little, Big to the poignancy and lyrical beauty of The Translator. Now he turns his unique genius in a different direction to imagine the novel the great, haunted, and enigmatic Romantic poet Lord Byron never penned ... but very well might have.

Documents discovered in a rotting old trunk in an English storage room prove that the manuscript of a novel by Byron once existed, and that it was saved from destruction, read, and annotated by Ada, Countess of Lovelace, a brilliant mathematician and Byron's abandoned daughter, during the final, agonizing months of her young life. While the curious mystery of what became of the manuscript itself is explored, we are permitted to read it — the whole of Byron's only novel — beginning to end.

And what a novel it is — a thrilling romance chock-full of treacheries and deceits, loves and fortunes gloriously gained and tragically lost; a tale of blood, vengeance, and mystery, of thrilling escapes and ruthless murder. Yet in the story of Ali — the bastard son of the demonic Lord Sane, torn from his life in high Albania to be raised a proper, if penniless, English gentleman — Ada finds gripping revelations of its author's hidden character, and glimpses into the secrets of his soul.

John Crowley's masterly creation is, in itself, a stunning and unprecedented act of literary impersonation. But Lord Byron's Novel is much more, weaving strands from different centuries into an extraordinary tapestry of loss and discovery, and the powerful, invisible threads that eternally bind parent to child. It is the story of a dying daughter's poignant attempt to understand the famous absent father she longed for to her last day, and the contemporary tale of the determined young woman who, by learning the secret of Byron's manuscript and Ada's devotion, reconnects with her own father, who was driven from her life by a crime as terrible as any Byron was accused of. John Crowley's novel is a wonder — a modern masterwork that moves, enlightens, and satisfies on everylevel.

"On a stormy night at Lord Byron's Swiss villa, Mary Shelley challenged her host, her husband and herself to write a ghost story. Mary's, of course, became Frankenstein. Byron supposedly soon gave up his — but, Crowley asks, what if he didn't? The result is this brilliant gothic novel of manners enclosed in two frames. In one, Byron's manuscript comes into the hands of Ada, his daughter by his estranged wife. Ada, in reality, became famous as a proto-cyberneticist, having collaborated on mathematician Charles Babbage's 'difference engine.' In Crowley's novel, Ada ciphers Byron's work into a kind of code in order to keep it from her mother. The second frame consists of the contemporary discovery of Ada's notes on Byron's story by Alexandra Novak, who's researching Ada for a Web site dedicated to the history of women in science. Alex is, a little too conveniently (this novel's one structural flaw), the estranged daughter of a Byron scholar and filmmaker; her interest in Ada dovetails with her father's interest in Byron, and she's fascinated by the notes and the code both. By applying Byron's scintillating epistolary style to the novel he should have written, Crowley creates a pseudo-Byronic masterpiece. The plot follows Ali, the bastard son of Lord 'Satan' Sane and an unfortunate minor wife of a minor Albanian 'Bey.' Sane finds and takes the boy, aged 12, back to Regency England. Ali's life is filled with gothic events, from the murder of his father (of which he is accused) to his escape from England with the help of a 'zombi,' the fortuitous and critical aid he gives the English army at the Battle of Salamanca and his love affair with a married woman. The myth of Byron's lost papers has a catalyzing effect on American literary genius, giving us James's Aspern Papers and now Crowley's best novel. Agent, Ralph Vicinanza. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Crowley's...magnificent new novel is multilayered and convoluted, a story within a story within a story that spans three centuries." Library Journal

"In an astounding display of scholarship and imagination, John Crowley has stitched together pieces of biography, literary history, textual criticism, computer science and cryptography." Washington Post

"Crowley's use of three different devices — Byron's work, a convincing piece of romantic fiction rich with thinly disguised autobiographical elements; Ada's annotations; and a series of e-mails exchanged in the present day — adds up to an intriguing and multilayered whole." Booklist

"Crowley's real achievement...is not a convincing imitation of Byron....[M]ore persuasive by far is the suffocating world of encryption and code, coincidence and conspiracy, paranoia and parapsychology that Crowley summons from his 19th-century documents and 21st-century decoders." Christopher Benfey, the New York Times Book Review

Spanning three centuries, Lord Byron's Novel interweaves three separate strands into one magnificent tale: the stories of a lost novel by Lord Byron, the daughter who tried to save it, and the woman who discovered her secret.

John Crowley lives in the hills above the Connecticut River in northern Massachusetts with his wife and twin daughters. He is the author of the novels Daemonomania; Love and Sleep; Aegypt; Little, Big; The Deep; Beasts;Engine Summer; and The Translator, and the short fiction collection Novelties & Souvenirs.