All Will Be Revealed

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Synopsis

A turn-of-the-century love story about a millionaire pornographer and a spiritualist medium. Set in New York City at the close of the nineteenth century, All Will Be Revealed opens in the photography studio of Augustus Auerbach, a wheelchair-bound recluse whose only interest is his extraordinarily successful business: the manufacture and marketing of pornographic pictures. Augustus's life changes, however, when one of his models pressures him to attend a seance and he meets the medium Verena Swann, who gives voice to the long-dead spirit of his mother. Augustus embarks on a series of private sittings with Verena, all the while not realizing that he is drawn to Verena personally, as much as to the proof of immortality that she offers him. Meanwhile, Verena is close to nervous collapse and overwhelmed by the demands of her sitters, who are half-mad with yearning for their dead loved ones. Her spiritualist powers have begun to fail her, and now forced to fake her public trances, she wonders whether her ability to talk to spirits was ever more than self-delusion. But her dead husband, the Arctic explorer Theodore Swann, begs her not to leave him voiceless before he can tell the story of his last, disastrous trip in search of the North Pole. And Theodore's brother, Leopold, the business partner who has transformed Verena's mediumship into a lucrative confidence game, decides that their next and greatest conquest will be Augustus himself. About the author: Robert Anthony Siegel was born in New York City and educated at Harvard, the University of Tokyo, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has worked as a Japanese translator, paralegal, furniture salesman, editor, and publicist, and now teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he lives with his wife, the writer Karen E. Bender, and their two children, Jonah and Maia. He has received fellowships from the Japanese Ministry of Education, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the Fine Arts Work