One man. Two women, both christened Esther. He renamed them both.

Jonathan Swift could rule a kingdom with his pen and could not say one plain word to the two women who loved him. He drew Esther Johnson across a sea and called her Stella. He met Esther Vanhomrigh in a London supper-room, made her Vanessa out of her own name, and could not keep her from following him to Ireland.

For twenty years he held them a dozen miles and one silence apart: the clever woman by the cathedral who signs herself spinster in her own hand, and the ardent one out at Celbridge who will not be loved at a distance. Then a dying woman writes the single letter that forces the question he has spent his whole life refusing to answer, and the wall he built around himself comes down on all three of them at once.

Drawn from Swift's own letters and verse and from the rumours that outlived them all, *The Naming of Esther(s)* is the story of a man who could name anything but the thing he felt, and of the two women who wore the names he gave them to the grave.

*A novel of Jonathan Swift, Stella, and Vanessa.*