By Any Other Name

By Jodi Picoult

What if the world’s most famous playwright is a woman you’ve never heard of? Meet Emilia Bassano, a ward of English aristocrats in Elizabethan London. Her education has endowed her with a sharp wit and a gift for storytelling, but still she is allowed no voice of her own.

Forced to become a mistress to the Lord Chamberlain, who oversees the theatre, Emilia discovers the power of stories to beguile audiences. Secretly, she forms a plan to bring a play of her own to the stage - by paying an actor named William Shakespeare to front her work. In modern-day Manhattan, playwright Melina Green finds a woman's voice is still worth less than a man's.

But, inspired by the life of her ancestor Emilia Bassano, Melina takes a lesson from history and submits a play under a male pseudonym . . .

Moving between Elizabethan England and modern day Manhattan, By Any Other Name is a beautifully written, compelling novel that explores the theme of identity and the ways in which two women, centuries apart - one of whom might just be the real author of Shakespeare’s plays - are both forced to hide behind another name to make their voices heard.

Format: Hardback, 544 pages

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd