Land of Marvels

Reviews / Votes

Richly peopled, fast-moving, cleverly plotted, written with economy and elegance, this novel has the satisfying density and sweep of a book twice its length * Sunday Times * Unsworth wraps his dark themes around a plot full of adventure and romance. Rifles are fired, locks are broken and necks are kissed in the midnight desert. * Daily Telegraph * Reading this novel is like watching an Olympic athlete about to win the gold: the seamless flow of action, the mastery of technique, seemingly effortless yet demanding attention and eliciting admiration as an end in itself * Guardian * The historical novel should do three things: make tangible the period in question; reflect it in to the modern world; and, like all novels, entertain. Barry Unsworth is a master of all three concerns ... * TLS * ... Land of Marvels could easily have become a morality tale about greed and imperial ambitions. But Unsworth is too canny a storyteller for that. It is greed that triumphs in the end. And, though empires change, imperial ambitions prevail. Such grim reflections on the past are sobering, too, when considering the current predicament of Iraq * Financial Times * Tensions mount in the desert as spies and assassins join the cast of soldiers and archaeologists, and the story hurtles on towards its fiery denouement. * Evening Standard * His prose is elegant and sure as ever. * Spectator * Unsworth is the most accomplished of novelists. All the characters are thoroughly imagined and ring true - even Jehar, convinced of the truth of his own lying rhetoric. As in all the best novels, characters reveal themselves in speech - and we see them as they present themselves to others. The plot moves faster as the novel gets into its stride. Unsworth, like Walter Scott, knows what is to be gained by an apparently languid introduction, scene-setting before the action takes over. He knows that credibility must first be established before action is significant. This is a cunningly put-together novel, in which the development of the plot advancing to an inexorable climax gains enormously from the deliberately leisurely opening. * Scotsman * A terrifically entertaining novel. -- Kerry Shale * Saturday Review, BBC Radio 4 * A richly imagined novel squarely in the tradition of his Booker Prize triumph Sacred Hunger. -- Geraldine Brooks