The Ghost Theatre

Set amid Elizabethan London's fabled underground children's theatre scene, a dazzling and hallucinatory historical novel that follows androgynous, bird-worshipping fortune teller Shay and the troupe's enigmatic leader, Nonesuch On a rooftop in Elizabethan London two worlds collide. Shay is a messenger girl and trainer of hawks who sees the future in the patterns of birds. Nonesuch is the dark star of the city's fabled child theatre scene, as famous as royalty yet as lowly as a beggar. Together Nonesuch and Shay create the Ghost Theatre, a troupe of actors performing for the people, not the rich, who put on magical plays in London's hidden corners. As these hallucinatory shows incite rebellion among the city's outcasts, the pair's relationship sparks and burns against a backdrop of the plague and a London in flames. Their fame is impossible to ignore, and soon they attract the attention of the queen herself. As the pair are swept up into the black web of the Elizabethan court, both are reminded that when people of their background fly too high, a fall is soon to come . . . Fantastical and stylistic, full of high drama and rich history, Mat Osman's The Ghost Theatre charts the rise and dramatic destruction of a dream born out of love and torn apart by betrayal.