The Dream Of Scipio
  • Published: 1 May 2003
  • ISBN: 9780099284581
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

The Dream Of Scipio

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Dec 2010
Paperback
1 May 2003
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A dark, erudite and utterly compelling novel from the author of An Instance of the Fingerpost and Stone's Fall.

Dark, erudite and like An Instance of the Fingerpost, utterly compelling, The Dream of Scipio confirms Iain Pears as one of Britain's most imaginative novelists

Set in Provence at three different critical moments of Western Civilisation - the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, the Black Death in the fourteenth, and the Second World War in the twentieth - The Dream of Scipio follows the fortunes of three men: Manlius Hippomanes, a Gallic aristocrat obsessed with the preservation of Roman civilisation, Olivier de Noyen, a poet, and Julien Barneuve, an intellectual who joins the Vichy government. The story of each man is woven through the narrative, linked by the classical text that gives the book its title, and by each man's love for an extraordinary woman.

‘Irresistibly seizes the imagination’ Evening Standard
  • Published: 1 May 2003
  • ISBN: 9780099284581
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

About the author

Iain Pears

Iain Pears was born in 1955. He is the author of seven detective novels, a book of art history and countless articles on artistic, financial and historical subjects, and three novels, An Instance of the Fingerpost, The Dream of Scipio and The Portrait.

Also by Iain Pears

Stone's Fall
An Instance of the Fingerpost
See all

Praise for The Dream Of Scipio

Irresistibly seizes the imagination

Evening Standard

Combining the visceral pleasures of a thriller with the more intellectual excitements of a novel of ideas... Beautifully constructed...never less than engrossing

Sunday Telegraph

Vivid, admirably imagined, ultimately very moving...This is a novel of the very highest ambition...immediate, sensuous, beautiful

Alan Massie, Scotsman

Combines dazzling erudition with assured narrative skills to offer glimpses of some of history's darkest corners, and stark and timely challenges to the very notions of civilisation and progress

Independent on Sunday

A dazzling hall of mirrors... Ferociously ambitious... Illumined by a fizzing passion for the recondite

Daily Telegraph
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