An Instance of the Fingerpost - Softcover

Pears, Iain

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573227951 ISBN 13: 9781573227957

Publisher: Penguin, 2000

Synopsis

A national bestseller and one of the New York Public Library's Books to Remember, An Instance of the Fingerpost is a thrilling historical mystery from Iain Pears.

"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

Iain Pears's The Dream of Scipio and The Portrait are also available from Riverhead Books.

About this title

Review:

An Instance of the Fingerpost is that rarest of all possible literary beasts--a mystery powered as much by ideas as by suspects, autopsies and smoking guns. Hefty, intricately plotted, and intellectually ambitious, Fingerpost has drawn the inevitable comparisons to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose; and, for once, the comparison is apt.

The year is 1663, and the setting is Oxford, England, during the height of Restoration political intrigue. When Dr Robert Grove is found dead in his Oxford room, hands clenched and face frozen in a rictus of pain, all the signs point to poison. Rashomon- like, the narrative circles around Grove's murder as four different characters give their version of events: Marco da Cola, a visiting Italian physician--or so he would like the reader to believe; Jack Prestcott, the son of a traitor who fled the country to avoid execution; Dr. John Wallis, a mathematician and cryptographer with a predilection for conspiracy theories; and Anthony Wood, a mild- mannered Oxford antiquarian whose tale proves to be the book's "instance of the fingerpost" (the quote comes from the philosopher Bacon, who, while asserting that all evidence is ultimately fallible, allows for "one instance of a fingerpost that points in one direction only, and allows of no other possibility").

Like The Name of the Rose, this is one whodunit in which the principal mystery is the nature of truth itself. Along the way, Pears displays a keen eye for period details as diverse as the early days of medicine, the convoluted politics of the English Civil War, and the newfangled fashion for wigs. Yet Pears never loses sight of his characters, who manage to be both utterly authentic denizens of the 17th century and utterly authentic human beings. As a mystery, An Instance of the Fingerpost is entertainment of the most intelligent sort; as a novel of ideas, it proves equally satisfying.

Review:

"May well be the best 'historical mystery' ever written."--The Sunday Boston Globe

"Ingenious."--The Philadelphia Inquirer

"[A] crafty, utterly mesmerizing intellectual thriller...Don't miss it." --The Washington Post Book World

"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

"Fascinating...quite extraordinary...elevates the murder mystery to the category of high art." --Los Angeles

"Extraordinary...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." --Houston Chronicle

"Enthralling." --San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1573227951
• ISBN 13: 9781573227957
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 704