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Books

This way to a parallel universe, via north Oxford

Andrew Taylor reviews Arcadia by Iain Pears, with a little help from the novel’s iPhone app

5 September 2015

9:00 AM

5 September 2015

9:00 AM

Arcadia Iain Pears

Faber, pp.596, £18.99, ISBN: 9780571301553

As a novelist, Iain Pears doesn’t repeat himself, and he gives with a generous hand. In Arcadia, he provides a dystopian vision of the 23rd century, scholarly espionage set in Cold War Oxford, and an Arts-and-Crafts pastoral called Anterwold, which involves swords and scholars and may or may not be the product of the imagination of one of the characters elsewhere.

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