The Pope's Rhinoceros

Reviews / Votes

Bawdy baroque-punk prose of marvellous fluency, overlaid with a gloss of heavy-weight erudition... an astonishing achievement, little short of a masterpiece -- William Dalrymple * Independent on Sunday * A gargantuan, dazzling fable by Britain's brightest young writer -- Steven Poole * Guardian * A story of adventure enthralling in its scope and inventiveness, by turns comic and horrific, zestful and elegaic, involving a reclusive order of monks whose church is slowly sliding into the sea; Renaissance Rome with its sexual license and political rivalries; war and atrocity in the Central Italian States; and a remote tribe in the West African rain forest. Running through this variegated fable is the search for the rhinoceros. The exuberance, the sheer proliferation of incident and scene, are disciplined and controlled by unerring narrative pace and cunning -- Barry Unsworth * Daily Telegraph * A truly fabulous piece of new British fiction -- James Saynor * Observer *