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ScarpiaStock informationGeneral Fields
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DescriptionMan is a delicate mechanism. he can easily be set off course. Promotion infoBased on one of the central figures from Tosca, Puccini's classic opera, Scarpia is a powerful story of love, lust and political intrigue set in Rome after the French Revolution ReviewsPiers Paul Read is one of Britain's most intelligent and disturbing writers New York Times Book Review Undoubtedly one of the most talented novelists of his generation Sunday Telegraph Inventive and rooted in sound historical research Mail on Sunday Marvellously comic, superbly inventive ... One of the most arresting British novelists The Times Brilliant ... perfect for nights in Stylist You don't need to know the opera Tosca to understand and enjoy this book about Puccini's most notorious villain ... [it] left me shocked and befuddled Spectator [An] intriguing combination of religiosity and evil Tablet The whole book is a vivid Ground Tour -- Simon Rees Literary Review What a pleasure it is to read a novel by a writer who knows precisely what he is doing and how to bring it off ... Piers Paul Read is a very good novelist indeed, one who sets himself different challenges with every book ... This is a wonderfully rich book, its picture of late-18th-century Rome, Naples, Calabria and Sicily absorbing, delightful, at times horrible, completely credible. Read has not only thoroughly mastered his research; he has done what the novel can do better than any history: he has illuminated it by his creative imagination ... Scarpia is an outstanding historical novel (which means it is simply an outstanding novel), up there, in this new golden age of historical fiction, with Hilary Mantel's Cromwell books and Robert Harris's Cicero trilogy -- Allan Massie Oldie Author descriptionPiers Paul Read is best known for his book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, which documented the story of the 1972 crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 and was adapted into a film in 1993. He has won a number of prizes for his fiction, including the Hawthornden Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. |