As Pears steadily builds his multiplicity of stories, his orchestrations become something far more ambitious, a calculated and at times quite droll assault on the very nature of narrative itself.' -Steve Donoghue, The Washington Post 'Arcadia leads readers into an escalating series of interconnected textual worlds.

''Qui moderatur tempus intelligit omnia,'' goes the Lytten family motto: ''He who controls time understands everything.'' Doesn''t that actually describe the art of plot construction and its master, Iain Pears?' -Michael Dirda, The Wall Street Journal ' is a master at creating structurally intricate novels. All this is again true, and then some, of Mr. The book dazzled for many of the usual reasons-fascinating characters, a richly presented fictive world, polished writing, lively dialogue, a serious engagement with ideas about life and morality-but, more unusually, it was also a masterpiece of plot construction.

Eighteen years ago I felt this way about Iain Pears''s intricate historical mystery An Instance of the Fingerpost. 'Every so often you read a novel to which the best critical response is simply ''Wow!,'' followed by a sigh of pleasure. When the authorities come knocking, she will make an important decision-one that will reverberate through all these different lives and worlds. Elsewhere, in a distopian society where progress is controlled by a corrupt ruling elite, the brilliant scientist Angela Meerson has discovered the potential of a powerful new machine. There she meets a young boy named Jay who is about to embark on a journey that will change both their lives. He finds an unlikely confidante in Rosie, an inquisitive young neighbor who, while chasing after Lytten's cat one day, stumbles through a doorway in his cellar and into a stunning and unfamiliar bucolic landscape-remarkably like the fantasy world Lytten is writing about. In Cold War England, Professor Henry Lytten, having renounced a career in espionage, is writing a fantasy novel that dares to imagine a world less fraught than his own. From the author of the international best seller An Instance of the Fingerpost, Arcadia is an astonishing work of imagination.

Arcadia book iain pears