New Boy

Tracy Chevalier was born on October 19, 1962 in Washington, D.C. She graduated from Oberlin College, a liberal arts college in Ohio, with a BA in English in 1984. After earning her B.A., she moved to the U.K., where she worked in the publishing industry for almost a decade before entering a master’s program in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She published her debut novel, The Virgin Blue, in 1997. Her second novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999), is also her most famous—it became a New York Times bestseller, receiving nominations for several literary awards. In 2003, it was adapted into a film starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth, and in 2008, it was adapted into a stage play. As of 2024, Chevalier has published 11 novels, including New Boy (2017), a retelling of William Shakespeare’s tragic play Othello (c. 1603) commissioned as part of the Hogarth Shakespeare Series, a project begun by Penguin Randon House in 2015 to reimagine Shakespeare plays in contemporary novel form. When Chevalier is not writing, she is involved in charitable and philanthropic work in the UK with organizations such as the Royal Literary Fund and First Story.

New Boy is set in Washington, D.C. in the 1970s, but its main character, Osei, is from Accra in Ghana, the son of a Ghanaian diplomat stationed in the U.S. At one point, the school’s racist principal Mrs. Duke cold-calls on Osei to give an overview of Ghana’s history for his White classmates. Osei briefly explains that Ghana was a colony of the United Kingdom until its declaration of independence in 1957. Though the United Kingdom officially declared the so-called “British Gold Coast” (which included Ghana) a colony in 1874, British traders had established a presence in the area in the 18th century, and the UK government had begun claiming lands in the area in the 1820s. Three years after the Ghana Independence Act of 1957, which ended British colonialism in Ghana, the country held its 1960 elections to determine its mode of government. In these elections, Ghana passed a constitution that made the country a democratic republic and voted Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) the country’s first president. Subsequently, Nkrumah interfered with elections and, in 1964, introduced a constitutional amendment to make himself president for life. In 1966, Nkrumah was deposed by the Ghana Armed Forces, leading to a period of instability and short-lived governments, one of which—mentioned by Osei as a recent event in the novel—involved General Ignatius Kutu Acheampong (1931–1979) overthrowing the government in 1972 and inserting himself as Ghana’s head of state.

New Boy is a contemporary reimagining of William Shakespeare’s tragic play Othello (c. 1603), about a Black general in the Venetian army named Othello whose resentful White subordinate Iago manipulates him into believing his faithful wife Desdemona has been unfaithful to him. Unlike Othello, whose main characters are adults, New Boy imagines the racism, manipulation, and jealousy of the play’s plot taking place among sixth-graders on a 1970s Washington, D.C. playground. The novel also alludes to an earlier Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595), which its child protagonists are putting on for school. When the novel’s analogue for Iago, manipulative sixth-grade bully Ian, points out that Dee (Desdemona) is playing a romantically “fickle” character Hermia, Dee retorts that Puck, the character Ian is playing, makes Hermia fickle using magic—foreshadowing how Ian/Iago will use manipulation to make Dee/Desdemona appear romantically fickle in Osei/Othello’s eyes. New Boy is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare Series, a set of contemporary novels by various literary authors reimagining Shakespeare plays; other notable novels in the series include Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (2016), a retelling of The Tempest (c. 1610), and Edward St. Aubyn’s Dunbar (2017), a retelling of King Lear (c. 1603–1606). New Boy is not the only contemporary novel that retells Othello; for example, Toni Morrison’s 2011 play Desdemona focuses on the play’s White heroine Desdemona and a maid named Barbary, who in Morrison’s version is Black, while Nicole Galland’s I, Iago (2012) is a novel exploring the backstory and motivations of the play’s villain Iago.