Iain Pears's acclaimed historical thriller, An Instance of the Fingerpost, was set in the 17th century and used four different narrators to investigate the murder of an Oxford don against a murky background of Restoration politics. His new novel is, if anything, more ambitious; The Dream of Scipio has three protagonists separated by 1,500 years in time whose violent deaths are related in the first few pages. The rest of this complicated novel is devoted to uncovering how these deaths came about.

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