CAN'T-WAIT WEDNESDAY: I can't wait for Wild by Nathan Besser

Can't-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Tressa at Wishful Endings, to spotlight and discuss the books we're excited about that we have yet to read. Generally they're books that have yet to be released. Find out more here.

My librarian flagged this novel by Australian Nathan Besser for me as a potential addition to my TBR. So glad she did. Any book described as a romp that features two larger than life characters from history has me excited!

Synopsis

An absolute romp, lead by Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Wild, through the criminal underbelly of thriving 17th century London.

Jonathan Wild knows power like almost no one else in London. He arrived as a wide-eyed young man in 1703, dazzled by a metropolis brimming with trade, immigration and crime. With a combination of greed, arrogance and ambition, Wild stopped at nothing to secure his place in this great and monstrous London and within a few years, he became the city’s Thief-Taker General, one of the most feared and wealthy officials in town, charged with the capture and arrest of felons for reward. But he’s matched in power only by the number of enemies he’s made along the way, and his star is burning rather too brightly for the likings of some.

Daniel Defoe is in trouble. Following a series of failed business ventures, the renowned pamphleteer, fiction writer and political operative is dead broke. Defoe must find a way to repay his creditors or he will be sent to the debtors’ prison, but, crippled with anxiety over his family’s future, he is unable to do the thing he does best: write. That is, until he visits Newgate Prison with the intention of chronicling the stories of its inmates, and meets a young man named Jack Sheppard. Sheppard also happens to be Jonathan Wild’s nemesis, and he has a story to tell.

Wild is a delightfully outrageous period drama that charts the rise and fall and rise again of two men whose lives become intertwined in the most surprising of ways.

Release Date: 3rd September 2019
Format: Paperback and ebook
Publisher: Penguin Books Australia
Genre: Historical Fiction