An Instance of the Fingerpost
"It is 1663, and England is wracked with intrigue and civil strife. When an Oxford don is murdered, it seems at first that the incident can have nothing to do with great matters of church and state....Yet, little is as it seems in this gripping novel, which dramatizes the ways in which...
show more
"It is 1663, and England is wracked with intrigue and civil strife. When an Oxford don is murdered, it seems at first that the incident can have nothing to do with great matters of church and state....Yet, little is as it seems in this gripping novel, which dramatizes the ways in which witnesses can see the same events yet remember them falsely. Each of four narrators--a Venetian medical student, a young man intent on proving his late father innocent of treason, a cryptographer, and an archivist--fingers a different culprit...an erudite and entertaining tour de force." --People
show less
Format: paperback
ISBN:
9781573227957 (1573227951)
ASIN: 1573227951
Publish date: April 1st 2000
Publisher: Riverhead Trade
Pages no: 704
Edition language: English
Category:
Novels,
Literature,
European Literature,
British Literature,
Book Club,
Historical Fiction,
Mystery,
Historical Mystery,
Thriller,
Mystery Thriller,
Crime
I think I could give it 5 stars, had I the time to read it the way it ought to be read - not over the period of two months, to begin with.
This is a very clever book, written from four different perspectives, of participants in the events, but it left me dissatisfied, as I felt no personal attraction to any of the four characters. When I started reading the second account I found it pretty confusing, as it seemed initially to be talkin...
bookshelves: historical-fiction, mystery-thriller, re-read, britain-england, books-with-a-passport, published-1997, restoration Read in May, 2009 ** spoiler alert ** "The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones." — Joseph JoubertThe Rashomon Effect at playthe op...
We are in England in the 1660s. Charles II has been restored to the throne following years of civil war and Cromwell's short-lived republic. Oxford is the intellectual seat of the country, a place of great scientific, religious, and political ferment. A fellow of New College is found dead in suspici...
Four dubious narrators tell their own version of the same events. All with different conclusions and different levels of unreliability. Keeping up with the major players isn't difficult, but remembering my British history enough to feel like I was treading water was. Thanks, google. There's a glorio...
Log in with Facebook 
