To Murder and Create - by Ardythe Ashley (Paperback)

About the Book

To Murder and Create is an extraordinarily creative and engaging historical novel loosely structured around T. S. Eliot's paradigm-bending modernist poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

Book Synopsis

To Murder and Create is an extraordinarily creative and engaging historical novel loosely structured around T. S. Eliot's paradigm-bending modernist poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Set in Boston of 1915, an array of eccentric and eminently charming tenants inhabit a boardinghouse sternly governed by a rule-bound yet likable landlady. They include the retired captain with a secret, the literary-minded cook, the spinster who has all but given up on love, two carpetbaggers who could have sprung from the pages of Mark Twain, the "confirmed bachelor" who stumbles into happiness, and the retired professor who is obsessed with his former student, T. S. Eliot. Star-crossed love, passion, jealousy, and courage take center stage in this captivating glimpse of an authentically rendered bygone world brimming with timeless questions of the heart and mind.

Review Quotes

"A spectacularly inventive novel...Reading it is like walking the half-deserted streets of Eliot's famous poem. It is an unforgettable experience."

-Patrick R. Query, author of Ritual and the Idea of Europe in Interwar Writing

"Ashley's delightfully playful novel reminds us that we are still learning to read the poem that made Eliot famous. She offers us fun, but smart fun."

-Michael Coyle, Colgate University

"Any reader who has measured their life with Eliot's words will be captivated by Ardythe Ashley's novel, To Murder and Create."

--Juan Manuel Escamilla González Aragón, University of Sussex & Aliosventos Ediciones

"Ashley's novel is about Eliot's ability to get under our skin, to send phrases rattling through our heads until they become structural supports for our thoughts and feelings. Along the way we live with 'Prufrock' just as her characters do, so that we may reflect on the power of poetry to influence our lives."

-Charles Sumner, The University of Southern Mississippi

"Ardythe Ashley brings 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' to life through timeless, relatable characters and a nuanced plot structure that is simultaneously haunted and driven by T. S. Eliot's modernist masterpiece."

-Elysia Balavage, Anisfield-Wolf Fellow, Case Western Reserve University

"A remarkable novel that creates a dialogue between generations. It is a work of creation and nihilism, whose characters seek their way to knowledge. Ashley's sharp and ironic prose brings J. Alfred Prufrock to life, in a constant hunt for the human voices that awaken him."

-Valentina Monateri, University of Turin

"The novel brilliantly illustrates the deep effect Eliot's seminal poem has on the characters' lives-priests, salesmen, a landlady, a typist, a cook, a captain, and even a cat. Readers will revel in the book's remarkable language play and parodic take on contemporary mores."

--Viorica Patea, University of Salamanca

"Immersive and suspenseful, To Murder and Create captures perfectly the frantic timbre of Eliot's 'Prufrock' through the desires and secrets of characters in Maybelle Gill's respectable boarding house. Encountering Eliot's poems and young Eliot himself in these pages feels like running into a dear friend while exploring a new city."

-Annarose Steinke, University of Nebraska at Kearney