"Engrossed in his attempt to forge Lord Byron's burned memoirs, an English bookseller neglects the explosive human situation around him." —WorldCat

"This is the story of a literary deception, told by the culprit himself, a charming young bookseller named Quentin Williams, who attempts nothing less than a forgery of Lord Byron's burned memoirs" [dust jacket advertisement]. The secret memoirs coming to light has long haunted and fascinated Byron's devotees. In the final two chapters, Moore writes herself into the text as a Byron scholar who comes to judge teh forged manuscript. Jocasta, as a fashion model, seems hardly suited to Byron studies. Quentin, in an attempt to keep her occupied, assigns her the task of finding all the references to animals in Byron's poetry, prose, and biographies. She finds the search irresistible and soon falls in love with Byron himself. Quentin becomes jealous over the obsession she has with the dead poet. Consequently, this adamantly staunch supporter of Byron decides to add a few scandalous parts to the memoirs to disillusion Jocasta's image of Byron. He essentially works against what he set out to do, which was to defend Byron against all his detractors. As a result, Jocasta burns the forged memoirs in the same grate in the Murray publishing house that had burned the original memoirsa tidy piece of irony there, especially with the mischievous Byron looking down from a portrait hanging on the wall." —G. Todd Davis