Francine du Plessix Gray, author of The Queen’s Lover, on tour April/May 2012

About The Queen’s Lover

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: The Penguin Press (June 14, 2012)

Few figures have as strong a hold on the public’s imagination as Marie Antoinette. Centuries after her death, she remains a fascinating character, whose life, loves, and death have been the subject of numerous books and films. Francine du Plessix Gray’s The Queen’s Lover: A Novel tells Marie Antoinette’s story from a new perspective. Historical fiction of the highest order, The Queen’s Lover reveals the untold love affair between Swedish aristocrat Count Axel von Fersen and Marie Antoinette.

The story begins at a masquerade ball in Paris in 1774, when the dashing von Fersen meets the mesmerizing nineteen-year-old Dauphine, Marie Antoinette, wife of the shy, reclusive prince who will soon become Louis XVI. The electric encounter launches a lifelong romance that will span the course of the French Revolution. Drawing on her training as a historian and her deep feeling for the period, Francine du Plessix Gray creates a richly imagined world, interweaving Von Fersen’s unfinished memoir, actual historical correspondence, and the recollections of Van Fersen’s dear sister, Sophie. Gray’s light touch reveals these titanic historical figures as utterly human, and we see them here as frivolous, desirous, manipulative, and complicated as they were in life. The Queen’s Lover is a fresh vision of the French Revolution and the French royal family as told through the love story at its center.

About Francine du Plessix Gray

Francine du Plessix Gray has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker and is the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, including Simone Weil, At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life, Rage and Fire, Lovers and Tyrants, and Soviet Women. She is most recently the author of Them: A Memoir of Parents, winner of the National Book Critics Circle award for best autobiography. She lives in Connecticut.