Iain Pears

Una mezcla perfecta de Tolkien y C. S. Lewis con pulso de un thriller político y elementos de ciencia ficción clásica.Oxford. Década de los sesenta. El profesor Henry Lytten intenta escribir una nuev

La novela de misterio más erudita desde El nombre de la rosa Robert Grove, un profesor del New College de Oxford, muere envenenado y su sirvienta es acusada del crimen. Los cuatro testigos -un noble fascinado por la anatomía, un criptógrafo y matemático, un erudito y un anticuario de Londresofrecen su versión de los hechos. Sólo uno de ellos dice la verdad, pero no siempre es fácil saber qué es la verdad.Una narración excepcional. Un auténtico placer para el intelecto.

We are in Oxford in the 1660s - a time, and place, of great intellectual, scientific, religious and political ferment. Robert Grove, a fellow of New College is found dead in suspicious circumstances. A young woman is accused of his murder. We hear about the events surrounding his death from four witnesses: Marco da Cola, a Venetian Catholic intent on claiming credit for the invention of blood transfusion; Jack Prescott, the son of a supposed traitor to the Royalist cause determined to vindicate his father; John Wallis, chief cryptographer to both Cromwell and Charles II, a mathematician, theologican and inveterate plotter; and Anthony Wood, the famous Oxford antiquary. Each witness tells their version of what happened. Only one reveals the extraordinary truth. An Instance of the Fingerpost is a magnificent tour de force: an utterly compelling historical mystery story with a plot that twists and turns and keeps the reader guessing until the very last page. Los Angeles Times Book Review

In his most dazzling and brilliant novel since "An Instance of the Fingerpost", Iain Pears tells the story of John Stone, financier and armaments manufacturer, a man so wealthy that in the years before World War One he was able to manipulate markets, industries and indeed whole countries and continents. A panoramic novel with a riveting mystery at its heart, "Stone's Fall" is a quest to discover how and why John Stone dies, falling out of a window at his London home. Chronologically, it goes backwards - London in 1909, then Paris in 1890, and finally Venice in 1867 - and Stone's character and motivation deepen as the book progresses; in the first part he is almost an abstraction, existing only in the memory of those who knew him; in the second he is a character, but only a secondary one; in the third he is the narrator of the story. A quest, then, but also a love story and a murder mystery, set against the backdrop of the evolution of high-stakes international finance, Europe's first great age of espionage and the start of the twentieth century's arms race. Like "Fingerpost", "Stone's Fall" is an intricate and richly satisfying puzzle, completely engaging on many levels, a triumphant return for one of the world's great storytellers.

Henry Lytten - a spy turned academic and writer - sits at his desk in Oxford in 1962, dreaming of other worlds. He embarks on the story of Jay, an eleven-year-old boy who has grown up within the embrace of his family in a rural, peaceful world - a kind of Arcadia. But when a supernatural vision causes Jay to question the rules of his world, he is launched on a life-changing journey. Lytten also imagines a different society, highly regulated and dominated by technology, which is trying to master the science of time travel. Meanwhile - in the real world - one of Lytten's former intelligence colleagues tracks him down for one last assignment. As he and his characters struggle with questions of free will, love, duty and the power of the imagination, Lytten discovers he is not sure how he wants his stories to end, nor even who is imaginary...

Henry Lytten - a spy turned academic and writer - sits at his desk in Oxford in 1962, dreaming of other worlds. He embarks on the story of Jay, an eleven-year-old boy who has grown up within the embrace of his family in a rural, peaceful world - a kind of Arcadia. But when a supernatural vision causes Jay to question the rules of his world, he is launched on a life-changing journey. Lytten also imagines a different society, highly regulated and dominated by technology, which is trying to master the science of time travel. Meanwhile - in the real world - one of Lytten's former intelligence colleagues tracks him down for one last assignment. As he and his characters struggle with questions of free will, love, duty and the power of the imagination, Lytten discovers he is not sure how he wants his stories to end, nor even who is imaginary...

This novel about idealism and its attendant disappointments begins in the fifth century B.C.E., when a scholarly writer named Manlius devoted his life to upholding the ideals of civilization against creeping barbarism--a resolve that includes armed force. The story continues into the 14th century, during the time of the Black Plague, when an agent seeking out ancient manuscripts for Pope Clement VI (of the Avignon Papacy) comes across Manlius's Neoplatonist manuscript ("The Dream of Scipio"), and inspired by his own high ideals tries to circumvent another plague, that of anti-Semitism. Finally, a historian in occupied France during World War II who has studied Manlius's manuscript is forced to work as a censor for the Germans. Each of these three sections also includes a love story, and each is a subtle illustration of Plato's ideas about harmony and order

Set in Provence at three different critical moments of Western Civilisation - the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, the Black Death in the fourteenth, and the Second World War in the twentieth - The Dream of Scipio follows the fortunes of three men, Manlius Hippomanes, a Gallic aristocrat obsessed with the preservation of Roman civilisation, Olivier de Noyen, a poet, and Julien Barneuve, an intellectual who joins the Vichy government. The story of each man is woven through the narrative, linked by the classical text that gives the book its title, and by each man's love for an extraordinary woman. Dense, dark, erudite and yet, like An Instance of the Fingerpost, utterly compelling, The Dream of Scipio confirms Iain Pears as one of Britain's most imaginative novelists.

La cuarta verdad presenta al lector un cuadro completo de las ideas filosóficas predominantes en la época. Pero el gran acierto del autor, atribuible sin duda a su afinada capacidad de narrar, es haber recreado fielmente no solo los habitos y costumbre de un tiempo pasado, sino tambien la manera de pensar y de ver el mundo sin lo cual seria imposible encontrar la solucion de la compleja trama. En suma, un autentico desafio para quienes buscan en una novela el estimulo intelectual ademas del placer de la lectura.

Justly praised for his complex historical thrillers (An Instance of the Fingerpost: The Dream of Scipio), Pears scales down to a simple tale of vengeance told by a narrator obsessed with destroying the man he once called his friend and mentor.