An Instance of the Fingerpost

A Novel

Author Iain Pears
Look inside
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.
  • WINNER
    Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award
© Lucinda Stevens
Iain Pears is the author of the bestsellers An Instance of the Fingerpost, The Dream of Scipio, Stone’s Fall, and Arcadia, and a novella, The Portrait, as well as a series of acclaimed detective novels, a book of art history, and countless articles on artistic, financial and historical subjects. He lives in Oxford, England. View titles by Iain Pears

About

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.

Awards

  • WINNER
    Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award

Author

© Lucinda Stevens
Iain Pears is the author of the bestsellers An Instance of the Fingerpost, The Dream of Scipio, Stone’s Fall, and Arcadia, and a novella, The Portrait, as well as a series of acclaimed detective novels, a book of art history, and countless articles on artistic, financial and historical subjects. He lives in Oxford, England. View titles by Iain Pears

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