Stones Fall, Iain Pears
Stones Fall, Iain Pears
4 Rating(s)
List: $32.50 | Sale: $22.75
Club: $16.25

Stone's Fall

Author: Iain Pears

Narrator: Roy Dotrice, John Lee, Simon Vance

Unabridged: 23 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/05/2009


Synopsis

A return to the form that launched Iain Pears onto bestseller lists around the world: a vast historical mystery, marvelous in its ambition and ingenius in its complexity.

In his most dazzling novel since the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears tells the story of John Stone, financier and arms dealer, a man so wealthy that in the years before World War One he was able to manipulate markets, industries, and indeed entire countries and continents.

A panoramic novel with a riveting mystery at its heart, Stone’s Fall is a quest to discover how and why John Stone dies, falling out of a window at his London home.

Chronologically, it moves backwards–from London in 1909 to Paris in 1890, and finally to Venice in 1867– and in the process the quest to uncover the truth plays out against the backdrop of the evolution of high-stakes international finance, Europe’s first great age of espionage, and the start of the twentieth century’s arms race.

Like Fingerpost, Stone’s Fall is an intricately plotted and richly satisfying puzzle–an erudite work of history and fiction that feels utterly true and oddly timely–and marks the triumphant return of one of the world’s great storytellers.

About The Author

Iain Pears was born in 1955. He is the author of the international bestseller An Instance of the Fingerpost, The Dream of Scipio, a series of highly praised detective novels, a book of art history, an opera libretto, and countless articles on artistic, financial, and historical subjects.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Laura on May 04, 2009

Well, all you Iain Pears fans can relax -- he's written a terrific book again. (I say this as an Iain Pears fan who had to throw The Dream of Scipio against the wall with great force.) As in An Instance of the Fingerpost, Pears uses multiple narrators to tell the story of financier John Stone's death......more

Goodreads review by Lars on December 21, 2017

The central question in Stone’s Fall is fairly simple: How and why did the powerful and extremely wealthy industrialist John Stone fall to his death from an opened window of his London home? To find the answer to that question, the intriguing but rather slow moving story is told by three different na......more

Goodreads review by Matt on May 08, 2015

Goddammit, this is twice now that Iain Pears has done this to me. I get maybe a quarter to a third of the way into his book and start thinking "This is ok, but I'm starting to lose interest. I'm not sure if I want to read much more of this story." But then it turns out the story isn't what you think......more

Goodreads review by Emily on July 30, 2010

This novel got steadily better as I read it--it's shaped like a Klein bottle. The first section, which takes place in London in 1910, is worth three stars. A journalist is hired by a mysterious wealthy widow to help resolve the will of her husband, John Stone, who died by falling out a window. The w......more

Goodreads review by K on February 05, 2013

Solid four-star read. Really and truly. I hesitate to use the word Dickensian because I was never a Dickens fan, but that's the word that comes to mind for me and I do mean it in a positive way. A long, twisty narrative full of larger-than-life characters who are intertwined in all sorts of unexpecte......more


Quotes

“When I read Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost years ago, I thought it was so brilliantly plotted, so compulsively entertaining, so utterly engrossing that I gave it to my father and said, 'This is the new Dickens.' Stone's Fall is better.”—Malcolm Gladwell

“Mr. Pears’s assured command of period history, language, lore, and attitudes is formidable.”The Wall Street Journal