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An Instance of the Fingerpost: A Novel
An Instance of the Fingerpost is that rarest of all possible literary beasts--a mystery powered as much by ideas as by suspects, autopsies, and smoking guns. Hefty, intricately plotted, and intellectually ambitious, Fingerpost has drawn the inevitable comparisons to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and, for once, the comparison is apt. The year is 1663, and the setting is Oxford, England, during the height of Restoration political intrigue. When Dr. Robert Grove is found dead in his Oxford room, hands clenched and face frozen in a rictus of pain, all the signs point to poison. Rashomon-like, the narrative circles around Grove's murder as four different characters give their version of events: Marco da Cola, a visiting Italian physician--or so he would like the reader to believe; Jack Prestcott, the son of a traitor who fled the country to avoid execution; Dr. John Wallis, a mathematician and cryptographer with a predilection for conspiracy theories; and Anthony Wood, a mild-mannered Oxford antiquarian whose tale proves to be the book's "instance of the fingerpost." (The quote comes from the philosopher Bacon, who, while asserting that all evidence is ultimately fallible, allows for "one instance of a fingerpost that points in one direction only, and allows of no other possibility.") Like The Name of the Rose, this is one whodunit in which the principal mystery is the nature of truth itself. Along the way, Pears displays a keen eye for period details as diverse as the early days of medicine, the convoluted politics of the English Civil War, and the newfangled fashion for wigs. Yet Pears never loses sight of his characters, who manage to be both utterly authentic denizens of the 17th century and utterly authentic human beings. As a mystery, An Instance of the Fingerpost is entertainment of the most intelligent sort; as a novel of ideas, it proves equally satisfying..
Price: $3.34
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William Dean Howells : Novels 1875-1886: A Foregone Conclusion, A Modern Instance, Indian Summer, The Rise of Silas Lapham (Library of America)
Four novels by America's most influential man of letters at the turn of the century, which explore the conflicts of private life and social institutions with unflinching realismn. Contains "A Foregone Conclusion" and "Indian Summer," dramas of complex romantic entanglements set in Italy, "A Modern Instance," the first full-scale study of infidelity and divorce in American fiction, and "The Rise of Silas Lapham," a brilliantly skeptical portrait of American business and new money..
Price: $10.50
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Instances of the Number 3: A Novel
Following the death of Peter Hansome, his wife Bridget is contacted by Frances Slater, her late-husband’s mistress Though the two are from opposite sides of London and meet under the least desirable circumstances, the women become close friends. In a subtly wrought turn of events, Bridget and Frances discover that they have in common what is important to them most: their parallel memories of Peter, killed in a car accident, and the shared reality of his spirit form, haunting them still. A gracefully tuned feat of the imagination, Salley Vickers’s novel is a rare celebration of life’s most intriguing geometries, the love triangle. .
Price: $1.91
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A Modern Instance (Penguin American Library)
She stopped Bartley looked at her a moment, and then caught her to him and fell a-laughing over her, till it seemed as if he never would end. "And you thought--you thought," he cried, trying to get his breath,--"you thought you were Eily, and I was Hardress Cregan! Oh, I see, I see!" He went on making a mock and a burlesque of her tragical hallucination till she laughed with him at last. When he put his hand up to turn out the gas, he began his joking afresh. The real thing for Hardress to do, he said, fumbling for the key, is to blow it out..
Price: $3.45
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DB2 Explained for Sybase Professionals
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