Barry Unsworth

1914, and an English archaeologist called Somerville is fulfilling a lifelong dream: to direct an excavation in the desert of Mesopotamia. Yet forces beyond his control threaten his work. The Great War is looming, and various interest groups are vying for control over the land and its many prizes.

As he writes on Nelson, a British biographer re-lives his battles and romances. But he is obsessed by a black mark against his hero, Nelson's massacre of Neapolitans. The biographer undertakes a trip to Naples and receives an explanation.

Simon, one of two alternating narrators, obsessively pursues a peculiar underground life: in the rambling, overgrown grounds of his sister Audrey's estate, he has for years been digging a secret system of tunnels to provide him with a haven of darkness, seclusion, and spying. The second narrator is Josh, of gypsy background. A naif, he has unpolished artistic talent. While working at a game booth at a fair he meets up with Mortimer - older, self-assured, and demanding. When Josh takes a job as a gardener at Audrey's home, Mortimer tries to consolidate his bond with Josh. The two women of the household, Audrey and her distant relative and housekeeper Marion, find Josh's strength and seeming innocence a potent spell. Josh finds himself responding to one of the women, escalating unacknowledged tensions between them. Meanwhile, Simon is worried that Josh will find his underground labyrinth and takes steps to prevent this exposure. Adding the strangely disturbing Mortimer to the mix leads to an explosive chemistry between the characters that will rip apart and rearrange all their lives.

The Ottoman Empire is at its most corrupt and, with his wife and son, Englishman Robert Markham returns to Constantinople, where--twelve years earlier--he saved himself as the Turks raped and murdered his Armenian fiancee.

Na de muiterij op een slavenschip, rond 1760, kunnen de overlevenden, blank en zwart, voor korte tijd een eigen wereldje inrichten.

"With his sure grasp of history and wide-ranging curiosity, Barry Unsworth brings to life the rich heritage of Crete and her stubbornly independent people, whose fierce spirit has withstood successive waves of invaders." "Unsworth explores every aspect of this realm, from the ancient myth of the Minotaur to the stunning archaeological sites that reveal the secrets of long-lost civilizations, from remote hermits' caves to Venetian palazzos to the Mosque of the Janissaries, fearsome shock troops of the Ottoman Empire. And woven throughout are tales of the heroes at the heart of the Cretan self-image, like the proud sixteenth-century rebel George Kandanoleon, who fought the Venetian invaders to a standstill until he was betrayed at a wedding-feast massacre worthy of a tragedy by Sophocles or Shakespeare."--Jacket.

A group of travelling players, touring England in 1390, in the years following the Black Death, grow tired of presenting the usual mystery plays and decide to re-enact a murder that has recently taken place in the town they are visiting.