A return to the form that launched Iain Pears onto bestseller lists around the world: a vast historical mystery, marvelous in its ambition and ingenius in its complexity.
In his most dazzling novel since the groundbreaking "New York Times" bestseller "An Instance of the Fingerpost," " "Iain Pears tells the story of John Stone, financier and arms dealer, a man so wealthy that in the years before World War One he was able to manipulate markets, industries, and indeed entire countries and continents.
A panoramic novel with a riveting mystery at its heart, Stone's Fall is a quest to discover how and why John Stone dies, falling out of a window at his London home.
Chronologically, it moves backwards-from London in 1909 to Paris in 1890, and finally to Venice in 1867- and in the process the quest to uncover the truth plays out against the backdrop of the evolution of high-stakes international finance, Europe's first great age of espionage, and the start of the twentieth century's arms race.
Like "Fingerpost," Stone's Fall is an intricately plotted and richly satisfying puzzle-an erudite work of history and fiction that feels utterly true and oddly timely-and marks the triumphant return of one of the world's great storytellers.