Boy by Nicole Galland, William Morrow, 2025, $30, 339 pgs.

Reviewed by Steve Donoghuue.

The two young main characters in Nicole Galland’s boisterously winning new novel Boy are each at a kind of personal crossroads — no longer completely content with their lives as they have known them, but also completely unsure how to step off into the future, and whether or not that future will be one they have in common.

Alexander (Sander) Cooke is the lead boy actor for the Chamberlain’s Men theatrical company at the dawn of the 17th-century and the end of the long reign of England’s Queen Elizabeth I. For years, he’s been the company’s star for the popular female acting roles created by, among other writers, master William Shakespeare.

Sander is very good looking and has grown comfortable with his fame.

“He’d have no idea what to do if he wasn’t recognized,” he thinks at one point, “since he’d first stepped foot on the Globe’s stage, that had never happened.”

But Sander has a problem: he’s getting older. No matter how often he plucks his thin sprouting whiskers or smooths his face with cream, he’ll soon be too old for the famous roles he’s made his own. As Boy opens, he’s the toast of London’s acting world, fielding dinner invitations from men and women alike, both highborn and otherwise, but he knows his renown is about to die a natural death.

Natural death fascinates the book’s other young protagonist, a young woman named Joan Buckler, who relies on her unremarkable appearance and unassuming aspect to shield her from detection when she sneaks into some of the primitive anatomical dissections of the day. She’s rudely shooed out of such demonstrations and all other attempts to study the men-only subjects that most intrigue her.

Joan and Sander have been friends since childhood, snarkily teasing each other and sharing their fears and frustrations, but even here, there are uncharted transitions in the offing: for the first time, they’re starting to notice each other’s bodies in ways that don’t occur to children.

Into this complicated tangle of emotion and uncertainty Ms. Galland weaves plenty of other active elements, including drawing both Sander and Joan into the orbit of the brilliant, eccentric Francis Bacon, who’s portrayed in these pages as a deeply enigmatic figure, mentally decades or perhaps centuries ahead of his time, dreaming of things his countrymen can’t conceive.

“If starlight began someplace very far away, and eventually reached Earth, then the light had to travel through the ether to reach them,” we read. “That must take time, he reasoned. Which meant the light that reached them must somehow age — by moments, or by hours — from the moment the star emitted it.”

Sander’s connection to Bacon is further complicated by his relationship with none other than Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, whose infamous 1601 rebellion was prefaced by the performance — by Sander’s Chamberlain’s Men — of Shakespeare’s Richard II. Devereux and his sister Penelope Rich very nearly dominate the second half of Boy, grabbing attention just as greedily in the book as they did in real life. By the time the action of that second half is heating up, readers will be anxious about whether or not our immensely likable young protagonists will even survive, much less thrive.

The book’s prevailing sense of unrest, of uncomfortable, unavoidable change, is as thrilling as it is unsettling. At one point, for instance, Sander thinks he might become a spy, an intelligencer, and the prospect excites him.

“This was a thrill he’d never known before: to be a small invisible cog in the machinery of state, rather than an idol of the superficial theatre world,” he thinks. “It gave him a sense of substance, of meaning, as if he had dined on fruit all his life and was now being offered venison.”

It’s impossible to read Ms. Galland’s novel, particularly the Joan parts, without thinking of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, in which she famously conjures up an imaginary sister for William Shakespeare.

“The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was,” Woolf writes. “She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother’s for the tune of words.”

But whereas Woolf sees only a tragic end to her Judith Shakespeare, Ms. Galland manages to infuse her own book with a few more shoots of hope. Not for Essex, certainly, and not really for Bacon, but for Sander and Joan. They’re inventive and resourceful; readers will be rooting for them.

Boy is a pleasingly nuanced and satisfying exploration of an Elizabethan world that was itself poised on the brink of change. It’s a small story brushing up against much bigger stories, the perfect blend for memorable historical fiction.