Iain Pears

A Novel

An Instance of the Fingerpost

Stone's fall

Giotto's hand

Set against the dramatic, untamed landscape of Brittany during one of the most explosive periods in art history, "The Portrait" is rich with atmosphere and suggestion, psychological complexity, and marvelous detail.

The Portrait

An ancient manuscript called "The Dream of Scipio" links three separate centuries--the fifth, the end of the Roman Empire; the fourteenth, the time of the Black Death; and the twentieth during World War II--and three stories of love, all set in Provence.

The Dream of Scipio

Den fjärde sanningen

X 5 Instance at the Fingerpost Reading Guide

In a major suspense novel set to surpass the internationally bestselling An Instance of the Fingerpost comes a dazzling story of youth, love and murderous ambition--a novel of time travel spanning three beautifully detailed worlds: the intellectual spires of Oxford in 1960, an ancient Arcadian world, and a dystopian future. In 1960, Henry Lytten is an Oxford don who dabbles in espionage and fiction writing. Rosie Wilson is the quick-witted, curious 15-year-old girl who feeds Professor Lytten's cat. Several hundred years in the future, living in a dystopian society on the Isle of Mull, is Angela Meerson--a brilliant psychomathematician who has discovered the world-changing potential of a powerful new machine. Somewhere, sometime, is Jay--a scholar's apprentice in an idyllic, pastoral land. Who these people really are, and how their stories come together, will be revealed in Iain Pears's fascinating great puzzle of a novel.

A novel

Arcadia

Why did artist Henry McAlpine forsake London - where he'd been feted by critics and gallery owners - to make his home on a remote outpost off the coast of Brittany? The truth begins to emerge when, four years into his exile, McAlpine receives his first visitor.

Iain M. Pears

Tale of vengeance set in an island of the coast of Brittany. A painter, Henry MacAlpine, paints a portrait of an art critic. The book is a monologue by the painter during the painting process, revealing past lives, loves and grudges.

"Deliciously literate" (Kirkus Reviews) and filled with "articulate characters and erudite art commentary" (The New York Times Book Review), this acclaimed series of novels by Iain Pears combines art and history, literature and mystery fiction, with the same passion for detail he displayed in his New York Times bestseller An Instance of the Fingerpost. In The Raphael Affair, the first book in the series, we are introduced to Jonathan Argyll, an enthusiastic young art scholar from England who has followed his suspicions about a long-lost Raphael painting to a small church in Rome. Not only is the painting in question gone from the site, it has been swiftly purchased, restored, auctioned, and installed in Rome's National Museum. But when the recovered Raphael is just as swiftly destroyed in a fire, Argyll begins to suspect its authenticity…and the innocence of every person in its path.

The Raphael Affair

Three narratives, set in the fifth, fourteenth, and twentieth centuries, all revolving around an ancient text and each with a love story at its centre, are the elements of this brilliantly ingenious novel, a follow-up to the international bestseller An Instance of the Fingerpost. Now Ian Pears returns with a greatly anticipated novel, so expertly imagined and perfectly constructed the author himself describes it as “a complexity.” The centuries are the 5th (the final days of the Roman Empire); the 14th (the years of the Plague — the Black Death); and the 20th (World War II). The setting for each is the same — Provence — and each has at its heart a love story. The narratives intertwine seamlessly, and what joins them thematically is an ancient text — “The Dream of Scipio” — a work of neo-Platonism that poses timeless philosophical questions. What is the obligation of the individual in a society under siege? What is the role of learning when civilization itself is threatened, whether by acts of man or nature? Does virtue lie more in engagement or in neutrality? “Power without wisdom is tyranny; wisdom without power is pointless,” warns one of Pears’s characters. The Dream of Scipio is a bona fide novel of ideas, a dazzling feat of storytelling, fiction for our times.

Iain Pears

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