[REVIEW] Sunday Times – Searching for Juliet

There’s a lovely & generous review of Searching for Juliet by Sophie Elmhirst in The Sunday Times today, specifically the Culture magazine. I love Culture magazine so reading such kind words about my book is a dream. I was especially glad that the reviewer talked about the work I did with older people at the Oxford Playhouse – for me, this was one of the book’s great joys. Run, do not walk to buy The Sunday Times! There is also an excellent pic of Ms Danes and Mr DiCaprio at their absolute 90s peak!

Pre-Order Searching for Juliet

I’m thrilled to say that my next book, Searching for Juliet (UK) or just Juliet (USA title) is now available for pre-order!

This book has been a delight to write, and I am – say it quietly – proud of it. I said a little bit about why, and about the benefits of writing for a wider audience, here.

Here is some blurb for Juliet:

Romeo and Juliet may be the greatest love story ever told, but who is Juliet? Demure ingénue? Or dangerous Mediterranean madwoman? From tearstained copies of the First Folio to Civil War–era fanfiction, Shakespeare’s star-crossed heroine has long captured our collective imagination.

Juliet is her story, traced across continents through centuries of history, theatre, and film. As scholar Sophie Duncan reveals, Juliet’s legacy stretches beyond her literary lifespan into a cultural afterlife ranging from enslaved African girls in the British Caribbean to the real-life Juliets of sectarian violence in Bosnia and Belfast. She argues that our dangerous aestheticization of the beautiful dead teenager and Juliet’s meteoric rise as a defiant sexual icon have come to define the Western ideal of romance.

Wry and inventive, Juliet is a tribute to fiction’s most famous teenage girl who died young, but who lives forever.
[from the USA publisher’s page]

The lovely UK edition, from Sceptre (an imprint of Hachette) will be released in hardback, ebook, and audio download on 6 April 2023. So far, you can pre-order it at all of the following!

The equally gorgeous USA edition will be released in hardcover and ebook by Seal Press (part of Basic Books). You can pre-order it thus far at…

Independent booksellers: If you’re an independent and it’s possible to pre-order from you, that would be very lovely to know! Please leave a comment and I’ll add your link to this post.

Searching for Juliet

I should have posted this sooner, but I’m so pleased to share that my book, Searching for Juliet, will be published by Sceptre in April 2023. They have worldwide rights and there will be an announcement about the US publication very soon! Here’s the Bookseller blurb for those who don’t subscribe (I do now subscribe – you can probably guess when I narcissistically started! – and really recommend it. I’m gradually building a list of 2021 reads):

Sceptre has acquired a cultural, historical and literary exploration of the birth, death and legacy of Shakespeare’s Juliet Capulet.
Searching for Juliet is authored by Dr Sophie Duncan, a fellow in English at Christ Church, University of Oxford, and expert on Shakespeare in performance and in the broader fields of theatre history.
In the book, according to Sceptre, she takes readers from the Renaissance origin story behind Shakespeare’s 13-year-old child bride, to the sexual revolutionary of ’60s film and theatre, fromthe African slave girls named after a fictional teenager to the legacy of the beautiful dead girl trope in everything from Shakespeare to contemporary TV series such as “13 Reasons Why”.
Associate publisher Juliet Brooke bought world rights from Georgina Capel, commenting: “I obviously have a certain bias with this subject that proves to me quite how much Juliet’s legacy reaches beyond literature into our social mores. What makes Sophie’s proposal so exceptional is the incredible range and depth of her exploration: the legacy of a heroine such as Juliet encompasses everything from feminism to scholarly insight on Shakespeare’s text, from a portrait of the Shakespeare industry in Stratford to questioning gender norms. It’s also fantastically sharp and witty and a total joy to read.”
Duncan said she was bowled over by the enthusiasm and vision of the team at Sceptre and remarked her new editor’s name was “a great omen”
read the full article here

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