“The latest of Barry Unsworth’s vivid historical novels brings to life a golden age of Muslim-Christian partnership. Boyd Tonkin meets him at his home in Umbria.”
From The Independent:
With his ability to make remote events into distant mirrors for our times, and a gift for excitingly believable period drama that shuns the twin pitfalls of archaism and anachronism, Unsworth has no superior among historical novelists at work today. After such masterly recreations of a credible European past as Pascali’s Island and Stone Virgin, he shared the Booker Prize in 1992 (with Michael Ondaatje) for his sweeping slave-trade epic, Sacred Hunger. At the same time, he moved to this green and rolling patch of Italy with his Finnish wife, Aira.
More here.
