The Notorious Dr. August: His Real Life and Crimes

An audacious epic of love, clairvoyance, and survival, following an eccentric trio across six decades of a changing America.

Christopher Bram tells the story of Augustus Fitzwilliam Boyd, alias Dr. August, a clairvoyant pianist who communes with ghosts, and who finds meaning in his life through a strange love triangle with a righteous ex-slave and nervous white governess.

The narrative follows Boyd from a wartime Confederate encampment to the fashionable salons of Europe with an exacting command of historical atmosphere. Bram moves his unlikely companions through Gilded Age brothels and séance circles, chronicling their shifting loyalties across decades of wandering.

European resorts and a grand waterfront estate on the Bosphorus surround the fragile household as the novel charts the complicated domestic bargain that binds them together.

Spanning the years between the Civil War and the early 1920's, this riveting and ambitious historical novel displays the immense talents of a prodigious, highly esteemed author working at the height of his powers.

• Spiritualism: Boyd channels unbidden compositions directly through his fingers at the keyboard, mystifying audiences from post-war New York to the grand salons of Europe.
• Found Family: An ex-slave, an aging governess, and a disgraced pianist construct an unlikely domestic haven across years of foreign exile, raising two children under the shadow of shared secrets.
• Unreliable Narrator: Looking back from a Harlem apartment in the 1920s, an elderly, blind Dr. August narrates his scandalous past with wry irony, questioning where authentic mediumship ended and calculated performance began.
• 19th Century: From carting a dead Confederate officer in a makeshift coffin made of an abandoned fishing punt to navigating the rowdy dime museums of Union Square, period detail grounds every stage of the journey.
• Also by This Author: Gods and Monsters, Lives of the Circus Animals and Exiles in America.