In the Shadow of Haymarket: A Story of Love and Defiance

by Richard Fleischman

A groundbreaking, heartrending novel that speaks as urgently to our present as it does to the past.

In an age ruled by propriety and repression—where love is criminalized and silence is survival—In the Shadow of Haymarket dares to tell the story of a forbidden love that refuses to die.

Set against the stark realities of Regency and early Victorian England—a time of social rigidity, moral panic, and legal persecution—this powerful historical novel follows William, a young man imprisoned for the crime of loving another. As he faces a society determined to erase him, he clings to memory, to truth, and to a letter that may never be sent but holds everything he cannot say aloud.

Richard Fleischman, acclaimed author and musical historian, crafts a lyrical, devastatingly intimate portrait of love under siege. With prose both elegant and raw, he invites readers into the depths of one man’s soul—a place where tenderness endures even in the face of cruelty, and where hope flickers, impossibly, through the cracks of a crumbling world.

Though rooted in the past, In the Shadow of Haymarket is a mirror held up to our own time. It is a story for anyone who has ever longed to live freely, to love truthfully, and to be seen.

Unflinching and unforgettable, this novel is not just historical fiction—it is a human document.