The Locusts Have No King

'Sparkling, lacerating fiction' The Paris Review

'Highly entertaining and curiously touching' New York Times

Frederick is a bookish medieval scholar living in a flat share. Lyle is a glamorous playwright who refuses to leave her husband. For years, their secret relationship has defied the odds.

But when Frederick's historical opus becomes an unexpected bestseller, he becomes the overnight literary darling of a scene he always despised. Suddenly, everyone wants a piece of him-admirers and opportunists alike.

As Lyle's Broadway career begins to falter, can their improbable love survive the helter-skelter of fortune and those who come along for the ride?

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Dawn Powell (1896-1965) was a novelist and playwright known for her satires of New York's cultural and literary circles. Born in Mount Gilead, Ohio, she endured a tumultuous childhood before running away at thirteen to live with an aunt who encouraged her writing aspirations. After graduating from Lake Erie College, Powell moved to New York City, immersing herself in the bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village.

She gained early recognition for her witty pieces in The New Yorker and Esquire, and in 1939 became a Scribner author, sharing the legendary editor Maxwell Perkins with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Although Powell enjoyed a devoted circle of admirers, her work drifted into obscurity after her death. Interest in her novels was later revived by the tireless work of Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Tim Page, executor of her estate, and also through Gore Vidal's influential appraisal in The New York Review of Books<