Synopses & Reviews
From the author of the international best sellerAn Instance of the Fingerpost, Arcadia is an astonishing work of imagination.
In Cold War England, Professor Henry Lytten, having renounced a career in espionage, is writing a fantasy novel that dares to imagine a world less fraught than his own. He finds an unlikely confidante in Rosie, an inquisitive young neighbor who, while chasing after Lytten's cat one day, stumbles through a doorway in his cellar and into a stunning and unfamiliar bucolic landscape remarkably like the fantasy world Lytten is writing about. There she meets a young boy named Jay who is about to embark on a journey that will change both their lives. Elsewhere, in a distopian society where progress is controlled by a corrupt ruling elite, the brilliant scientist Angela Meerson has discovered the potential of a powerful new machine. When the authorities come knocking, she will make an important decision one that will reverberate through all these different lives and worlds.
Review
"Arcadia leads readers into an escalating series of interconnected textual worlds.... Pears is a great writer of ideas and intellectual adventure." The New York Times Book Review
Review
"[Pears] is a master at creating structurally intricate novels.... As Pears steadily builds his multiplicity of stories, his orchestrations become something far more ambitious, a calculated and at times quite droll assault on the very nature of narrative itself." Steve Donoghue, The Washington Post
Review
"Every so often you read a novel to which the best critical response is simply 'Wow!,' followed by a sigh of pleasure. Eighteen years ago I felt this way about Iain Pears’s intricate historical mystery An Instance of the Fingerpost. The book dazzled for many of the usual reasons — fascinating characters, a richly presented fictive world, polished writing, lively dialogue, a serious engagement with ideas about life and morality — but, more unusually, it was also a masterpiece of plot construction. All this is again true, and then some, of Mr. Pears’s Arcadia.... 'Qui moderatur tempus intelligit omnia,' goes the Lytten family motto: 'He who controls time understands everything.' Doesn’t that actually describe the art of plot construction and its master, Iain Pears?" Michael Dirda, The Wall Street Journal
About the Author
Iain Pears is the author of the best sellers An Instance of the Fingerpost, The Dream of Scipio and Stone’s Fall, and a novella, The Portrait, as well as a series of acclaimed detective novels, a book of art history, and countless articles on artistic, financial and historical subjects. He lives in Oxford, England.