Fencing Master - Hardcover

Perez-Reverte, Arturo; Soto, Sonia; Costa, Margaret Jull

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151001812 ISBN 13: 9780151001811

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999

Synopsis

A request from a mysterious woman draws fencing master Don Jaime into a dangerous plot involving seduction, political intrigue, top-secret documents, and murder, in a historical mystery set against the turbulent backdrop of 1868 Madrid. By the author of The Seville Communion. 100,000 first printing. BOMC. Tour.

About this title

Review:

Described as a "master of the intellectual thriller", Arturo Perez-Reverte has established himself as a major figure in European fiction. The English translation of The Fencing Master, first published in Spanish in 1988, follows the critical success of The Flanders Panel and The Dumas Club.

Contemplative, skilful, and--in a quiet way--melancholy, The Fencing Master is a foray into historical fiction: Perez-Reverte draws his figures against the background of a Madrid sweltering on the eve of Spain's September Revolution in 1868. Each of its eight chapters begins with an epigraph to the art which emerges as a way of interpreting the world through this novel: fencing. Jaime Astarloa, the master, has made fencing his life and legacy, and it's through his eyes--the eyes of a man who wants to resist the vulgar progress of 19th-century politics and passions--that the mystery, and tragedy, of the book unfold. It begins with a woman who wants to learn fencing--"At that moment, someone knocked at the door, and nothing would ever again be the same in the fencing master's life"--a woman who draws Astarloa into a world of political and erotic intrigue which will test his art to the limit.--Vicky Lebeau

Review:

"You will want to reach the book's nearly perfect ending in a single sitting" (Time Out)

"The author is in the best sense a romantic and to read him is to rediscover the delights of Dumas and Conan Doyle" (Amanda Craig The Times)

"As assured and elegant as Don Jaime's sword thrusts" (Stephanie Merritt Observer)

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0151001812
• ISBN 13: 9780151001811
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 245