1468. A young priest, Christopher Fairfax, arrives in a remote exmoor village to conduct the funeral of his predecessor. The land around is strewn with ancient artefacts – coins, fragments of glass, human bones – which the old Parson used to collect. Did his obsession with the past lead to his death? As Fairfax is drawn more deeply into the isolated community, everything he believes – About himself, his faith and the history of his world – is tested to destruction
Robert Harris is the author of eleven bestselling novels: the Cicero Trilogy - Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator - Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, The Ghost, The Fear Index and An Officer and a Spy, which won four prizes including the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and Conclave. Several of his books have been filmed, including The Ghost, which was directed by Roman Polanski. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in West Berkshire with his wife, Gill Hornby.
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A thoroughly absorbing, page-turning narrative in which the author, with his customary storytelling skills, pulls us ever deeper into the imaginative world he has created. It [also] poses challenging questions about the meaning of the past, the idea of progress and the stability of civilisation. It is a fine addition to Harris’s diverse body of work. (Sunday Times)
A return to the type of high-concept novel that made his name . . . [T]he writing is elegant and pacy. The characters are fleshed out and the plot zips along. (The Times)
A truly surprising future-history thriller. Fabulous, really. (Evening Standard)
Harris is rightly praised as the master of the intelligent thriller. Genuinely thrilling, wonderfully conceived and entirely without preaching, it probes the nature of history, of collective memory and forgetting, and exposes the fragility of modern civilisation. (Daily Telegraph, 5 stars *****)
Harris's bleak imagined world issues a clarion call to the present, urging us to recognise the value of progress, the importance of woolly concepts like liberalism and the rule of law, and all the other ideals we’ve spent generations fighting for yet seem prepared to sacrifice on the altar of populism. For make no mistake, this novel [is] very much about the here and now . . . Harris is a master of plotting and, in elegant, understated third-person prose, he ratchets the tension ever upwards . . . this is nothing if not a page-turner. (Observer)
