The Dream Of Scipio

Jan 23, 2025 7:09 AM

Author:Iain Pears

The Dream Of Scipio

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

Reviews

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

An astonishingly assured début, funny and serious ... I was delighted

—— Salman Rushdie

She is . . . a George Eliot of multi-culturalism

—— Daily Telegraph

[Zadie Smith] is one of the prominent voices of her generation

—— Sunday Times

Britain's finest young author

—— The List

[Zadie Smith] packs more intelligence, humour and sheer energy into any given scene than anyone else of her generation

—— Sunday Telegraph

[White Teeth] established a model for how to make sense-and art-out of the complexity, diversity and pluck that have defined the beginning of this century

—— Time

The first publishing sensation of the millennium

—— Observer

White Teeth reflects a new generation

—— Guardian

[Zadie Smith] is one of the prominent voices of her generation

—— Sunday Times

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