The Dream of Scipio

Table of Contents

 

 

Praise for
The Dream of Scipio

 
“Erudite and highly readable . . . [Pears’s] fans will rejoice in
The Dream of Scipio
.”
—USA Today

 
“Imagine a ropemaker, turning and twisting three fibers to make one immensely strong strand. Or perhaps a hairdresser, weaving three hanks of hair into an intricate and beautiful plait. Such is the ambitious structure of Iain Pears’s new novel. . . . A book that begins as an admirable intellectual accomplishment, and becomes, in the end, a thrilling journey through history, into the human heart and soul.”
—The Washington Post

 
“Pears could not have chosen a setting richer in beauty or in historical resonance. . . .
The Dream of Scipio
is an adventure and an achievement to match
An Instance of the Fingerpost
.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

 
“Lucid and informative . . . audacious and sophisticated.”

 
“Pears’s finest book yet, even more successful and riveting than its predecessor . . . immensely readable, fast-moving, and full of wonderful juxtapositions.”
—The Boston Globe

 
“Iain Pears is everybody’s fantasy of the ultimate history teacher. . . . His popular mysteries, so intricately woven from the threads of the past, have given the genre more class and intellectual depth than it’s ever had. . . . This is another wildly entertaining novel. . . . Pears has constructed a kind of literary Rubik’s Cube, spinning these stories through each other in short chapters that produce fascinating patterns and parallels. . . . One of the dazzling pleasures of this novel is Pears’s ability to follow the bumble-bee flight of an idea through the ravages of time . . . remarkable . . . This is a novel for our time about all time. Those who ignore Iain Pears are doomed to repeat the past.”
—The Christian Science Monitor

“
The Dream of Scipio
is not a mystery story. But it is a mysterious book, plumbing the shifting motives and passions of its perplexed characters and tracking the startling trajectories of ideas over the course of centuries. . . . Pears weaves back and forth, making it easier for the reader to grasp their parallels, contrasts and ironies. His novel is roughly in the tradition of Umberto Eco’s
The Name of the Rose
, but it has more passion and urgency than Mr. Eco’s lighter, more playful work.
The Dream of Scipio
is complex, surprising and thought-provoking, a dream of a novel in more senses than one.”

 
“A dazzling hall of mirrors . . . a remarkable read, compulsive not only as a historical novel, but also as a genuine novel of ideas.”

—The Daily Telegraph
(London)

 
“Iain Pears is a special kind of risk taker—a philosophical mystery writer with an uncommon talent for popularizing the obscure and arcane, and telling a hell of a story while doing it. . . . People who thought Pears could not top
Fingerpost
are going to be surprised. He did.”

 
“Engaging.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune

 
“Brilliantly constructed . . . a stunningly dramatic crescendo. Pears has leapt to a new level, creating a novel of ideas even more suspenseful and revelatory than his justly acclaimed mysteries.”

—Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

 
“Ambitious . . . a novel about civilization on the brink . . . It’s the pleasures of narrative, the interplay of character and situation, and the vivid depictions of the past . . . that animate this book.”
—San Jose Mercury News

 
“Interesting historical detail, echoes of the past reverberating in the present, especially since September 11, and surprising parallels in lives lived hundreds of years apart.”
—Chicago Sun-Times

“Iain Pears is back, and once again, he’s full of philosophy, history and well-crafted plot. . . . An enormously accomplished work that stands as a learned novel of ideas, a meditation on history and a moving love story, all rolled into one volume. . . . This tandem of thought-provoking ideas and dramatic human situations makes
The Dream of Scipio
a worthy successor to
Fingerpost
.”
—BookPage

 
“Pears lends artistic shape and might to his well-wrought materials. Form and content join hands in
The Dream of Scipio
, lending poignancy to the efforts of characters striving to assert their freedom in the teeth of a historical necessity that will rend them with a shrug.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

 
“Pears has a nice sense of what it means to live in a time when things fall apart. . . . [A] complex treatment of provocative historical and moral themes.”
—Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

 
“An intelligent and erudite work of historical fiction. Iain Pears, who demonstrated with his
An Instance of the Fingerpost
that he is a writer to be taken seriously, does not disappoint the reader in this most recent work.”

 
“The weave of his pattern is admirable. There is little that gets lost in the telling of so many tales in one—a testament to his skill.”
—The Seattle Times

 
“Pears, switching backwards and forwards through the centuries, interweaves the stories with extraordinary skill. . . . The novel gains in power and weight, irresistibly seizes the imagination.”
—Evening Standard
(London)

 
“[A] graceful new novel . . . the novel’s density and uncompromising refusal to dumb anything down is refreshing; it’s also hugely readable and often impossible to put down. A remarkably elegant and humane book that deserves many readers.”
—Sunday Tribune
(London)

 
“[A] grand-scale historical thriller . . . Pears’s elaborate narrative triptych is dazzling.”
—Booklist
(starred review)

“Combine[es] the visceral pleasure of a thriller with the more intellectual excitements of a novel of ideas. . . . Beautifully constructed and, for such a cerebrally challenging book, remarkably easy to read. . . . It is never less than engrossing.”
—The Sunday Telegraph
(London)

 
“The plotting is a marvel; the text moves smoothly among the three eras, drawing parallels that rarely seem forced. In the end, Pears asks good, cutting questions about the idea of civilization, showing that those who claim to preserve it are often its worst enemies.”
—Library Journal

 
“An altogether more mature and confident work than
Fingerpost
. . . . Pears’s new novel is good value for history buffs, providing a veritable pageant of convincing and compelling re-creations of fascinating epochs. . . . Pears combines dazzling erudition with assured narrative skill to offer glimpses of some of history’s darkest corners, and stark and timely challenges to the very notions of civilization and progress.”

—Independent on Sunday
(London)

 
“A brilliant juggling act . . . vivid, admirably imagined, ultimately very moving. . . . If the highest test of a work of imaginative literature is whether it can make you think and feel at the same time, this novel passes it.”
—The Scotsman

 
“A mystery of human behavior in terms of virtue, altruism, friendship, love, betrayal and courage, and the nature of civilization. . . . This is a necessary book, one to exercise the mind and the heart, to savor and reread and talk about, so full is the story of ideas and its characters of human complexities.”
—The Courier-Mail
(Australia)

 
“Elegantly written, brilliantly structured,
The Dream of Scipio
is as demanding as it is satisfying to read. . . . At once intimate and philosophically profound, this is a dream that will stay with the reader for a long, long time.”

Praise for
An Instance of the Fingerpost

 
“May well be the best historical mystery ever written.”

 
“If you liked Umberto Eco’s
The Name of the Rose
, you should run to buy Iain Pears’s lavishly erudite historical mystery.”
—The New York Times

 
“Utterly mesmerizing . . . Iain Pears has written an impressively original and audaciously imaginative intellectual thriller. . . . Don’t miss it.”

 
“Fascinating . . . quite extraordinary . . . elevates the murder mystery to the category of high art.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review

 
“Enthralling . . . a gripping, expert, and wholly plausible journey to a singularly fascinating time and place.”
—San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

 
“Ingeniously plotted, briskly narrated and intellectually supple . . . this thriller brings not merely a huge cast of characters but a whole century vividly to life.”
—Newsweek

 
“[A] novel that will have you sitting up all night and calling in sick the next day. It’s that hard to put down. . . . A superior entertainment.”

 
“An erudite and entertaining tour de force.”
—People

 
“A whopping-good whodunit . . . [a] potent brew, good to the very last drop.”
—Mirabella

 
“Fans of such mystery/history hybrids as
The Name of the Rose
and
The Alienist,
pull up a chair and settle in ...”
—Entertainment Weekly

“A rollicking murder mystery . . . elegant, accessible, and tinted with delicate humor . . . it is unlikely you will be able to guess whodunit.”

 
“A thoroughly surprising conclusion. . . . The author is unquestionably a learned scholar as well as a nervy and ingenious plot-master.”

 
“[A] page-turner.”
—Vanity Fair

 
“Stylish and memorable . . . Mr. Pears’s assured command of period history, language, lore and attitudes is formidable.”
—The Wall Street Journal

 
“Dickensian in breadth and darkness,
An Instance of the Fingerpost
is an intricately plotted, thinking-person’s thriller that moves far beyond the question of who murdered whom and why. With commanding sureness of period idiom and scholarly penchant for detail, Iain Pears has penned an absorbing, multifaceted tale. . . . Brilliantly conceived and executed.”

 
“Utterly absorbing . . . a deeply satisfying puzzle.”

 
“Richly imagined . . . [the story] unfolds in a turbulent atmosphere of scientific, political, and religious dissent.”
—The New Yorker

 
“Skillfully combines history and fiction.”
—Chicago Tribune

 
“A big, ingenious, intricately plotted fiction that constantly twists around to examine the premises of its own art and craft.”
—Seattle Weekly

 
“Thoroughly satisfying, hard to put down . . . polished entertainment.”

 
“[A] strange, gripping, and excellent work.”
—London Free Press
(Ontario)

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