Exile is never silent. It echoes in the sea, the wind, the pages of a book.
A futurist, banished for seeing too far ahead, waits alone on his sailboat off the coast of Maine. His days are measured by weather and memory, by the approach of storms and the uncertain promise of Hannah—his stepdaughter, a cam girl turned reluctant prophet of the planet’s unraveling—who must flee across the ocean.
As the world around him fractures, he turns inward, into The Forsyte Saga, the novel that has become his companion and mirror. The genteel discontents of Galsworthy’s age begin to merge with his own; Irene Forsyte drifts from the page into his imagination, until he begins to rewrite both their stories into one sweeping lineage of desire, invention, and decline—a history of how humanity brought itself to the edge.
Lyrical, haunting, and quietly prophetic, The Industrial Revolution of Love traces the blurred boundaries between solitude and imagination, history and fiction, and the fragile stories we tell to make sense of a collapsing world.

Praise for The Industrial Revolution of Love

“A charming biblio-fiction circling The Forsyte Saga, Roger King’s witty autofictional fantasia tracks capitalism’s effects through the century since Galsworthy brought Soames and Irene to life. Fans of Nell Stevens’s Bleaker House, Elif Batuman’s The Possessed, or Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19 will find this excellent company.”

—Andrea Barrett, National Book Award winning-author of Ship Fever and Natural History