![]() ![]() Courtine and Austin parted bitterly 20 years before and hope to effect a belated reconciliation. Ostensibly, Courtine has come to Thurchester to visit his former college roommate, Austin Fickling. The memoir recounts Courtine's 1881 visit to the cathedral town of Thurchester, site of the mysteries that will gradually dominate the novel. At the end of this encounter - which makes numerous references to events and people we know nothing about - the narrative shifts abruptly, taking us into "The Courtine Account," a memoir written by Cambridge historian Edward Courtine. The novel opens with a brief preface in which Philip Barthram, editor of the manuscript we're about to read, travels to Geneva for an enigmatic encounter with an old, dying woman. ![]() In his fourth novel, The Unburied, Palliser turns to the late Victorian era to give us an equally authoritative reconstruction of the past and a tightly compressed narrative filled with treachery, drama, and interconnected mysteries. ![]() ![]() In 1990, Charles Palliser made a spectacular debut with The Quincunx, a huge, densely plotted book that illuminates, in extraordinary detail, virtually every level of English society in the early 19th century. A Historical Murder Mystery of the Highest Order ![]()
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