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The Dream of Scipio

The Dream of Scipio
  • Author(s): Iain Pears
  • Location(s): Provence
  • Genre(s): Fiction, Mystery
  • Era(s): Various

Set in Provence at three crucial moments of Western civilisation (the final collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, the Black Death in the 14th century, and the Second World War in the 20th), Pears presents the...

The Last Judgement

The Last Judgement
  • Author(s): Iain Pears
  • Location(s): England, Paris, Rome
  • Genre(s): Mystery
  • Era(s): Modern

Paris can do strange things to a man’s mind… like making him agree to an apparently harmless favour of escorting a picture to Rome. ‘The Death of Socrates’ is a particularly nondescript piece, so art dealer Jonathan Argyll can...

The Portrain

The Portrain
  • Author(s): Iain Pears
  • Location(s): Brittany
  • Genre(s): Fiction, Mystery
  • Era(s): Modern

Set on the bleak and windy island of Houat near the coast of Brittany, The Portrait describes the retreat into isolation of the painter Henry MacAlpine, who has performed a Gauguin-like cutting off of his previous life, leaving a...

The Raphael Affair

The Raphael Affair
  • Author(s): Iain Pears
  • Location(s): Rome
  • Genre(s): Crime

The Titian Committee

The Titian Committee
  • Author(s): Iain Pears
  • Location(s): Venice
  • Genre(s): Mystery
  • Era(s): Modern

Membership of the prestigious Titian Committee is normally considered a high honour. Normally, that is, until two of its members end up dead and someone seems to be taking the idea of backstabbing a little too far. Flavia de...

Downriver

Downriver
  • Author(s): Iain Sinclair
  • Location(s): London
  • Genre(s): Short Stories
  • Era(s): Modern

Downriver is constructed as twelve interlocking narratives, in which Iain Sinclair traces the ruins of Margaret Thatcher’s reign through the lens of a fictional film crew that has been hired to make a documentary about what’s left of London’s...

Lights Out for the Territory

Lights Out for the Territory
  • Author(s): Iain Sinclair
  • Location(s): London
  • Genre(s): Travelogue
  • Era(s): Modern

Walking the streets of London, Iain Sinclair traces nine routes across the territory of the capital. Connecting people and places, redrawing boundaries both ancient and modern, reading obscure signs and finding hidden patterns, Sinclair creates a fluid snapshot of...

London Orbital

London Orbital
  • Author(s): Iain Sinclair
  • Location(s): London
  • Genre(s): Travelogue
  • Era(s): 2000s

Yes,this one man’s trip around the M25 – a walk in several stages, from Waltham Abbey to Shenley, Abbots Langley to Staines, Staines to Epsom and Epsom to Westerham before going on to Dartford, the river and Carfax and...

Rodinsky’s Room

Rodinsky’s Room
  • Author(s): Iain Sinclair, Rachel Lichtenstein
  • Location(s): London
  • Genre(s): Biography, Nonfiction
  • Era(s): 20th century

David Rodinsky lived above a synagogue in the heart of the old Jewish East End of London, and sometime in the late 1960s he disappeared. His room, a chaos of writings, annotated books and maps, gramophone records and clothes,...

The Last London

The Last London
  • Author(s): Iain Sinclair
  • Location(s): London
  • Genre(s): Travelogue
  • Era(s): Modern

Iain Sinclair has been documenting the peculiar magic of the river-city that absorbs and obsesses him for most of his adult life. In The Last London, he strikes out on a series of solitary walks and collaborative expeditions to...

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