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Books

Puccini’s villain as swashbuckling hero

Scarpia, Piers Paul Read’s latest novel, skilfully transforms Tosca’s notorious scoundrel into handsome lover and gallant man of action

29 October 2015

9:00 AM

29 October 2015

9:00 AM

Scarpia Piers Paul Read

Bloomsbury, pp.367, £16.99, ISBN: 9781408867495

You don’t need to know the opera Tosca to understand and enjoy this book about Puccini’s most notorious villain, Vitellio Scarpia, portrayed on stage as a ‘sadistic agent of reaction’, a cut-throat murderer who enjoys drinking his victims’ blood from their skulls and, as one of my opera-loving Kensington pals puts it, ‘not a nice bloke at all!’

In fact you may not even recognise him in these pages.

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