A playwright possessed by her muses. An actress desperate to succeed. A doctor haunted by lost love.
These three people cross time and space to meet through the playwright's bizarre creative process: to create, she must become her characters; to tell her tragic story, the actress must speak from the grave; to heal his harrowing past, the doctor must surrender to his patient—the playwright.
Set in the surreal landscape of the playwright’s modern Manhattan, the glittering, treacherous Broadway of the insatiable Jazz Age, and the tranquil, spice-scented escape of a Grecian paradise, All the World’s a Wonder explores the nature and cost of creating art, the devastating persistence of love, and the redemptive power of storytelling.
Melia McClure weaves magical characterization and vulnerable emotion in a story that resounds like a thunderclap."
— Kenneth Mark Hoover, author of the weird west novels Haxan and Quaternity
"Author Melia McClure is a razor-sharp explorer of the surreal, incomprehensible constructs of inner and outer realities, journeying through the perilous worlds of memory, guilt, loneliness, desire, and hope with an unflinching eye. Shifting seamlessly between playscript and prose and leaping from the violence of lost love to the salvation of storytelling, All the World's a Wonder reveals the staggering possibilities of the artist’s mind and the human heart."
— Cathie Borrie, author of the long hello: Memory, My Mother, and Me
"Compulsive, kinetic, and visceral. McClure brings to hectic life the factions of an artist’s heart, littering the way with secrets, half truths, and a movable feast of unreliable narrators, leaving us all to wonder:
what do our muses get up to on the other side
of the mirror?
— S.M. Beiko, award-winning author of The Stars of Mount Quixx