The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine - Softcover

Praise for Paul Collins' NOT EVEN WRONG' 'Few things are more heartbreaking than learning that your child is destined to be an outsider...Collins conveys this sad truth beautifully...[A] fascinating portrait of his son' Entertainment Weekly 'Collins elucidates, with great compassion, what it means to be "normal" and what it means to be human' Los Angeles Times 'A genre-bending spellbinder' Newsday Praise for Paul Collins' Sixpence House 'Collins muses on antiquarian books the way the rest of us remember lost loves' San Francisco Chronicle

The author of "Common Sense" and "The Rights of Man", a radical on the run from the law in London, a founding father of the United States of America, a senator of revolutionary France, Thomas Paine alone claims a key role in the development of three modern democracies. He was a walking revolution in human form - the most dangerous man alive. But in death, Paine's story turns truly bizarre - his bones were taken from New York to London and eventually disappeared. In Paris, London and New York, in bars, grocers, shops and national libraries, crossing paths along the way with, among others, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, William Cobbett, Walt Whitman, Charles Darwin and even Lord Bryon, Paul Collins sets himself the challenge of finding out what happened to Paine's bones, and ends up telling one of the most extraordinary stories of modern history.