This was a very scholarly, cerebral novel, the kind which I enjoy but that will not be to everyone’s liking because it had the tendency, especially in the third narrative, to be a tad long-winded. A historical novel starts from fact, but its creator must mesh fiction with facts to create a compelling narrative.

there's a sort of mystery I couldn't really get into, and there's regular (and, at the end of the book, carefully cited) appearances by british scientists and philosophers of the period, but there was nothing that actually made me want to pay attention. Sometimes these instances of the fingerpost meet us accidentally among those already noticed, but for the most part they are new, and are expressly and designedly sought for and applied, and discovered only by earnest and active diligence.

As if that were not enough, this man is a spy for his country England, and he meets a woman who flees from the future, and who flees from a dystopian society, and who creates her own world, or rather experiments with it. And I checked and saw that the fourth long narrative is a third farty old fart, who no doubt will probably contradict the other three and reveal their narratives to be (shocketty shock) a tissue of deliberate fabrication and self-deception. I also think the book is more rewarding upon finishing it and reflecting on it as a whole; I felt only moderately warm about it until I reached the end of the final narration, at which point I felt considerably awestruck (Sarah Waters' Affinity had the same effect, although I felt only less-than-lukewarm about the novel up until the end).

An ingenious tour de force: an utterly compelling historical mystery with a plot that twists and turns and keeps the reader guessing until the very last page. An Instance of the Fingerpost had been on my radar for quite some time before I actually picked it up. Pears first came to international prominence with his best selling book An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997) , which was translated into several languages.The novel is narrated by four different narrators, each of which tells his version of the story: Marco da Cola, a Venetian Catholic physician who has just arrived in England; Jack Prescott, son of a Royalist traitor who is bound on clearing his father's name; John Wallis, a genius mathematician and cryptographer who served both Cromwell and Charles II, who has a fondness for conspiracies; and lastly Anthony Wood, an Oxford antiquarian. Graži ta būtinybės idėja, holmsiška, bet sykiu pamatai, kad gyvenime, atrodo, kažkurie kiti dėsniai veikia.

Defeating the royalists, Scots, and Irish (in the case of Ireland a real genocide was practiced), and in foreign policy Cromwell despite the fact that France welcomed Charles II (Cromwell in a controversial decision brought Charles I to trial and executed him, making him a martyr), however, that did not prevent the alliance with Cardinal Mazarin , and an unnatural alliance against Spain with which it obtained very good results. This is a world where a man can jump in one sentence from being a highly analytical and insightful mathematician to a paranoid bigot thinking that all papists can be nothing other than duplicitous and sinister ne’er-do-wells scheming to bring down the kingdom. Ken Follet told us about the danger, and the threat posed by Catholics, and the risk of civil war (although it is true that at first he is also the Puritans, yet he treats Calvinists better than Catholics. Bet jų funkcija - ne tiek sukrėsti ir priversti viską permąstyti (kaip trileriuose, pvz pas Flynn), kiek atskleisti vis didesnius planus ir paveikslus, į kuriuos įsipainioję veikėjai. I also wish I’d known in advance that the whole concept of the novel is that you’re going to hear the whole story, repeatedly, from different perspectives.He also met young Sarah Blundy and tasked himself with trying to heal her mother's broken leg, free of charge, but also exploring some of his own ideas about the transfusion of blood. I am not sure if Pears did it deliberately, but for me this book also worked as a reminder how we only see women's life through the eyes of men throughout history, how rare it is for women to tell their story and in this book we end up knowing quite a bit about the main woman in the narrative but we never get her point of view. Although the exact circumstances of his death are unclear, all signs point to poison; soon a young woman named Sarah Blundy is accused of his murder. How might this play have particular significance in Restoration England, particularly in Oxford, which was a Royalist stronghold?

Along with the new areas of philosophy, which includes the budding knowledge of medicine, alchemy and belief in witchcraft still exist.Well he was against slavery, but if the crusty bastard who captains the vessel is willing to hold prayer meetings with them all across the ocean than he was in. However, I do not like unreliable narrators, especially those that largely treat anyone that isn't an affluent man with outright disrespect. Like many men, then and now, he liked a glass of alcoholic liquor at the end of the day to calm his frazzled nerves and hopefully give him a gentle push off into the land of Morpheus.