“Trenchant and insightful . . . observations about ghost stories, inspiration, poetry, and being an expatriate are incisive . . . soars through lines of jazzy musicality . . . lofty and intellectual, shining new light on their canonical stories.” —Foreword Clarion Review International Gold Winner of the Readers’ Choice Book Awards— What Light Was is a triumphant, genre-defying masterwork of literary imagination. It is part dialogue novel, part historical reenactment, and part metaphysical confession. Co-authored by Shawn Callaway Hays and Stephen Callaway Hays, this lush, lyrical, and kaleidoscopic novel resurrects the spirits of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Mary Shelley, and Percy Bysshe Shelley to stage a dazzling, time-bending conversation between the Romantic and Modernist sensibilities. Across a centennial gulf from The Great Gatsby , this novel becomes a radiant, tragicomic séance about memory, love, authorship, and the furious beauty of creation. Structured as a novel-length dialogue mosaic, What Light Was unfurls through the alternating voices of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald as they expatriate themselves through the villas and vineyards of France in the mid-1920s. In this reimagined world, Scott is not merely writing The Great Gatsby —he is also composing himself, mythologizing his past, and wrestling with the ghosts of his literary ancestors. Zelda, meanwhile, remains his mercurial muse and interlocutor: fierce, brilliant, hilarious, and tragic. Through their banter—both heartbreaking and hysterical—we overhear echoes of another past: the young Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her brilliant, brazen lover Percy Shelley. But these Romantic paragons are not reduced to historical artifacts, they are vivified as urgent presences, with their letters and philosophies illuminating Zelda and Scott’s modern anxieties. The novel thus becomes a spiritual quadrille between two artistic couples across two centuries, staging the metaphysical question: Can love, literature, and legacy redeem the brokenness of time? The novel draws from and adapts a rich lattice of canonical texts, including The Great Gatsby , Prometheus Unbound , Frankenstein , Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , Godwin’s anarchist philosophy, and even Keats’s pastoral sadness. The Fitzgeralds' sharp, syncopated dialogue flares against the luminous prose of the Shelleys, whose writings are lovingly reconstructed in innovative epistolary and philosophical modes. Beneath its pyrotechnics of wit and erudition, What Light Was pulses with deep feeling: the ache of artistic failure, the terror of domestic life, the ecstatic rebellion of young love, and the shimmering, elusive redemption found in shared language. It is a novel of passionate intelligence, aching tenderness, and a frenzied desire to turn the debris of life into lasting art. For readers of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando , Michael Cunningham’s The Hours , or Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body , this is a novel where time is porous, art is a séance, and authors are both haunted and haunting. A work of startling originality, What Light Was is not merely a novel—it is a resurrection. It sings with typewriter clatter, cigarette smoke, and star-fire, bringing the past to bear on the present with language that is lyrical, lacerating, and luminously alive. Major Themes: The philosophical inheritance of Romanticism on Modernism - The ontology of authorship and the psychology of inspiration - Historical and literary reincarnation - Gender, creativity, and domestic tragedy - Memory, exile, and myth-making - Epistolary love and aesthetic resurrection - The metaphysical burden of fame and art - Shelleyan idealism and Fitzgeraldian disillusionment