Features

The Dumas Club
by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Vintage
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Lucas Corso is dragged into a plot involving murder, sex and bibliophiles when asked to authenticate what looks to be a manuscript of Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. Books and reality intertwine as Pérez-Reverte takes readers into the heart of a literary mystery.

The Last Dickens
by Matthew Pearl
Harvill Secker
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The year is 1870 and America awaits the latest instalment of the novel Dickens was writing when he died. In Pearl’s ingenious story, a young publisher is murdered and his employer is thrust into a mystery that takes him across the Atlantic in search of the truth. 

The Historian
by Elizabeth Kostova
Time Warner
Out now
A woman is plunged into a bizarre quest that will lead her towards the truth about the Dracula myth when she discovers an ancient book and a pile of yellowing letters in her father’s library. Elizabeth Kostova’s debut novel reworks the history and literature of vampirism into a dazzlingly original narrative.

The Book Thief
by Markus Zusak
Black Swan
Out now
Death is the narrator of this extraordinary story of a young girl in Nazi Germany whose life in that most dark and dangerous of times is shaped by the books she steals and reads. Zusak’s tale of the redemptive power of words is one of the most striking literary novels of recent years. 

And don't forget Carlos Ruiz Zafón's Shadow of the Wind and The Angel's Game. Read our exclusive interview with the author here.