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I took this with me yesterday to add to the books for the English-speaking OBCZ which I hope to start up soon. But I've just looked at the blurb, and it's compared to The Name of the Rose, which is one of my favourite books, so now I've got to read it before I let it go; I just can't resist! It is also compared to Dickens and Henry James.

There are lots of enthusiastic reviews quoted in the front of the book, including the following:
"it is the kind of book readers wait for, a book to get lost in... Few books, at most a dozen or two in a lifetime, affect us in this way." The Philadelphia Inquirer.
"That Palliser succeeds in capturing this distant world of Victorian fiction is impressive enough for openers. That he makes The Quincunx a gripping read throughout most of its length is practically miraculous." Time Magazine.
"A sensation... resembles the surprising worldwide best seller The Name of the Rose... Both of these superbly entertaining novels tease the intellect with intricate, multilayered mysteries, and each brilliantly evokes a past era." Atlanta Journal & Constitution

The Quincunx by Charles Palliser

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Initially fascinating, it was so convoluted, it turned into a real struggle to understand what was going on. This was compounded by the fact that nobody told the truth, many people deliberately told lies that concealed the truth and made all conjecture totally pointless. This was like trying to understand quantum physics. Then, after over a thousand pages of mental torture, the protagonist dismissed several important friends and enemies by saying they had gone abroad and he never heard of them again. Plus the whole inheritance case the book revolved around was still up in the air. This could probably be turned into an 19th century soap opera with more twists and turns than East Enders, but boy oh boy, it was a difficult read. Im obviously not cut out to be a lawyer.

I’m also not very observant because I had nearly finished this time before I read the quotation on the front cover from Time magazine:
“That Palliser succeeds in capturing this distant world of Victorian fiction is impressive enough for openers. That he makes The Quincunx a gripping read throughout most of its length is practically miraculous.”Most of its length!!! Talk about damning with faint praise! And that’s the quote they chose for the front cover? Cunningly setting it in capital letters so my eye didn’t pick up on it. Good grief!

P.S. I’ve been reading other reviews and am amazed to discover that one of the family names used central to the plot, John Huffam, were Charles Dickens’s middle names!

Released at the New Year’s meeting in Eindhoven.

This book has been released as part of the following BookCrossing challenges:
- The Ultimate Challenge - read and release books, with extra points for a monthly theme
- Reduce Mount TBR (To Be Read) - read and release books on the TBR list since before the end of the previous year.

This was still left at the end of the meeting, so I took it back home to release somewhere else.