Book Talk & Signing

Award-winning Florida author and UNF teacher, Ron Destro, will be at 2nd & Charles Bookstore to talk about his shortlisted debut novel, The Starre, the Moone, the Sunne, on Saturday, October 28, from 2-6pm. Destro, an actor, playwright and director, has written an Elizabethan murder mystery whose solving just happens to reveal the true identity of William Shakespeare. It is a (mostly) true tale filled with suspense and humor, touching on the powerful love of fathers, the perils of the plague, an executed printer, a kidnapped actor, pilfering pirates, and the mysterious life and tragic death of the Bard of Avon. 

At 2:00, the author will talk a bit about the book and the legitimacy of the Shakespeare authorship question, and then be on hand to sign books until 6pm. He has spent more than twenty years researching the question of who really wrote using the pen-name of William Shakespeare, which has also been asked by fellow-doubters from Mark Twain and Walt Whitman to Helen Keller and Anne Rice to Orson Welles and Sigmund Freud. Encouraged by fellow actors Mark Rylance and Michael York, he has lectured on the topic at places like Chautauqua Institution, where he taught a course on the subject, Harvard University, the Edinburgh Skeptics Society, and even in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he stages plays.

Sir Derek Jacobi, who narrated the audiobook, called the novel “excitingly powerful and a joy to read.” William Niederkorn of The New York Times said it had “all the mystery and suspense of Harry Potter and even more substance. A laugh riot!” And Steve Cuden, co-creator of Jekyll & Hyde, The Musical, called the book “marvelously amusing, deeply passionate, and brilliantly entertaining. What Ron Destro has gifted the world is nothing less than the stuff that dreams are made on.”

Destro is founding director of the New York and London-based Oxford Shakespeare Company, which produces the Bard’s works in their historic settings, such as Hamlet in Elsinore, Denmark, and Macbeth in Birnam Wood, Scotland. He is also author of The Shakespeare Masterclasses, the Kennedy Center Award-winning play Hiroshima, for which Yoko Ono wrote the original score, and currently teaches theatre at the University of North Florida.

The book has just received 5 stars and the “Highly Recommended” award of excellence from The Historical Fiction Company, and was shortlisted in the Flash 500 Novel Opening competition. Released by Contempo Publishing, information about the book and audiobook can be found at rondestro.com and at Amazon and other booksellers.