Necroscope

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Bill Price

In 1922 Howard Carter uncovered what is still regarded as the most spectacular archaeological discovery ever made. Tutankhamun's tomb had remained hidden in the Valley of the Kings for more than 3000 years and its discovery caused a media sensation, elevating the previously little-known Egyptian Pharaoh into the position of an international celebrity. The contents of the tomb were found almost entirely intact, including the Pharaoh's mummified body, still wearing its solid gold funeral mask. Tutankhamun lived in an era when the Egyptian Empire, centred on the royal city of Thebes, was at its pinnacle and when the wealth and power of its Pharaoh was at its greatest. This was also a period of enormous religious upheaval. Akenaten, the heretical Pharaoh and, more than likely, Tutanhkamun's father, had introduced a new religion, exclusively worshipping the sun god Aten. Under Tutanhkamun, the old religion, with its many gods and goddesses, was restored, putting an end to the heresy. In recent years research has shed new light on Tutankhamun's life and, in particular, on his death. A new exhibition, Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, has toured America and came to London in November 2007. Public interest in the boy king is as strong as ever and our knowledge of the sophisticated and complex society over which he reigned continues to grow.

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Brenda James and William D. Rubinstein

Motivated by scholarship and driven by curiosity, Shakespeare historian Brenda James applied a sixteenth-century code-breaking technique to the dedication of Shakespeare's Sonnets. What she uncovered led her to the truth behind literature's greatest mystery. For more than 150 years, academics have questioned how William Shakespeare of Stratford, a man who left school at age thirteen and apparently never traveled abroad, could have written such a broad and deep body of work, one that is said to draw on the largest vocabulary of any writer in the English language. Now, in The Truth Will Out James and history professor William D. Rubinstein explore the facts behind James's important findings, detailing how her work on the dedication led to the name Sir Henry Neville, a prominent Elizabethan diplomat whose life unlocked the secrets of the Shakespeare Authorship Question once and for all. Examining the true nature of Shakespeare of Stratford's involvement with the plays, the authors reveal the London actor to be a mere pawn, while Neville, the Oxford-educated ambassador to France and a member of Parliament for twenty-eight years, was actually the Bard. Disguising his authorship to avoid bringing scandal and shame to his family name, Neville spent a great deal of time abroad in Europe, entering a realm of aristocratic intrigue and mystery that provided the foundation for some of his greatest plays. With insightful explanations of never-before-studied documents, James and Rubinstein demonstrate that not only did the refined and worldly Neville know the landscape of Shakespeare's plays firsthand but that these works represent a total convergence of the events in Neville's life. But the evidence proving Neville's authorship is not merely circumstantial. Comparing mysterious signatures and Neville's richly woven family lineage, the authors paint a portrait of a man whose claim moves beyond the speculative. An experienced politician, who was well-versed in the intrigues of the Court, Neville was locked away in the Tower of London for his part in the unsuccessful Essex Rebellion against Queen Elizabeth. Using a collection of Neville's writings from his imprisonment, James and Rubinstein provide an exhaustive cross section of the intrigue surrounding Neville's life, exposing the events that led to his hidden writings and the cloaking of their true origin. Captivating and elucidating, The Truth Will Out is a revelatory exploration of two men and their times that will forever change the landscape of Shakespearean scholarship.

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Barbara Vine

It is 1905. Asta and her husband Rasmus have come to East London from Denmark with their two little boys. With Rasmus constantly away on business, Asta keep loneliness and isolation at bay by writing a diary. These diaries, published over seventy years later, reveal themselves to be more than a mere journal. For they seem to hold they key to an unsolved murder and to the mystery of a missing child. It falls to Asta's granddaughter Ann to unearth the buried secrets of nearly a century before.

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Sebastian Faulks

A worthy successor to Birdsong' Alain de BottonIn 1942, Charlotte Gray, a young scottish woman, goes to Occupied France on a dual mission: to run an apparently simple errand for a British special oeprations group and to search for her lover, an English airman who has gone missing in action. In the small town of Lavaurette, Sebastian Faulks presents a microcosm of France and its agony in 'the black years'. Here is the full range of collaboration, from the tacit to the enthusistic, as well as examples of extraordinary courage and altruism. Through the local resistance chief Julien, Charlotte meets his father, a Jewish painter whose inspiration has failed him.In a series of shocking narrative climaxes in which the full extent of French collusion in the Nazi holocaust is delineated, Faulks brings the story to a resolution of redemptive love. In the delicacy of its writing, the intimacy of its characterisation and its powerful narrative scenes of harrowing public events, Charlotte Gray is a worthy successor to Birdsong.