Irresistibly seizes the imagination * Evening Standard * Combining the visceral pleasures of a thriller with the more intellectual excitements of a novel of ideas... Beautifully constructed...never less than engrossing * Sunday Telegraph * Vivid, admirably imagined, ultimately very moving...This is a novel of the very highest ambition...immediate, sensuous, beautiful -- Alan Massie * Scotsman * Combines dazzling erudition with assured narrative skills to offer glimpses of some of history's darkest corners, and stark and timely challenges to the very notions of civilisation and progress * Independent on Sunday * A dazzling hall of mirrors... Ferociously ambitious... Illumined by a fizzing passion for the recondite * Daily Telegraph *
Iain Pears was born in Coventry in 1955. Educated at Wadham College, Oxford, he has worked as a journalist, an art historian and a television consultant. He is the author of several highly praised detective novels, a book of art history, countless articles on artistic, financial and historical subjects, An Instance of the Fingerpost and Stone's Fall.