Land of Marvels: A Novel » (Reprint)

Barry Unsworth, who won the Booker Prize for Sacred Hunger, was a Booker Prize finalist for Morality Play and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize for The Ruby in Her Navel. He lives in Italy.

“There is something of E. M. Forster in Unsworth’s knowing depiction of a decaying empire.”—The New Yorker

The Barnes & Noble Review

The past, William Faulkner wrote, is never dead and isn't even past. He might have added that the present, at least in fiction, is always present. Just as the past keeps creeping into our contemporary lives, so do writers and readers like to insinuate our current preoccupations into stories about what went before.

This kind of sly time-bending is a hallmark of the novels of Barry Unsworth. Born in an English mining village in 1930, he's the author, since 1966, of 16 books, many of which range across time and space from 12th-century Sicily (The Ruby in Her Navel, 2006) to the last days of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century (The Idol Hunter, 1980). Like all fiction, Unsworth's historical novels both reflect on and are influenced by the age in which they were made. Land of Marvels returns to territory he has covered already -- Mesopotamia in the beginning of the 20th century -- while illustrating, through the story of an archaeological dig, the way time's layers "were jumbled up and the dawn of history confused with the day before yesterday."