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Product Details
Washington Square Press, November 2000
Trade Paperback, 432 pages
ISBN-10: 0743410513
ISBN-13: 9780743410519
Description
In Victorian England, Dr. Courtine is invited to spend the days before Christmas with Austin, a friend from his youth, in the Cathedral Close of Thurchester. Courtine hopes to research an unsolved mystery at the cathedral library, but when Austin captivates him with the story of the town ghost -- a macabre tale of murder and deception dating back two centuries -- Courtine finds himself drawn instead into a haunting world of avarice, skullduggery, and exceptional evil.
Daring, unpredictable, atmospheric, The Unburied is a dazzling entry in the canon of classic Victorian masterpieces of suspense.
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Browse Inside The UnburiedThe Washington Post Book World
Probably generates as much plot per page as is humanly possible to.
Entertainment Weekly
As the layers of dirty deeds are unearthed, [the novel] feels like an archaeological dig
-- mesmerizing, meticulous.
The Wall Street Journal
The Christmas ghost was a staple of Victorian holiday fiction, and The Unburied is an elegant update of the tradition that is both modern in its concerns and wholly convincing as an artifact of another age.
The New York Observer
Enormously enjoyable.
The New Yorker
All the murders are puzzles, and Palliser constructs his plot like a maze and lures readers into it. The books ruthless consistency of style and the somewhat bleak view of humankind set it apart from the usual thriller.
Palo Alto Daily News
There is little doubt that The Unburied confirms to all, British or American, that Palliser is one of the world's most imaginative historical novelists.
The Washington Post Book World
A fine literary diversion for a winter's night or two....The novel's prose moves swiftly but pauses from time to time for lengthy -- and interesting
-- conversations about the nature of religious belief, historical investigation, and marital passion. Palliser even inserts sentences that call to mind tags from nineteenth-century authors like Nietzsche and Thoreau ('When you come to die you'll realize that you have not lived').
The Wall Street Journal
No one is exactly as he seems to be.
The Guardian (London)
Charles Palliser now bids to be our leading contemporary Victorian novelist.
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
A complex chronicle of evil, immorality, and greed....Both a gifted raconteur and a shrewd observer of human nature, Palliser should win new readers on this side of the Atlantic with this compulsively readable tale.
Salon.comEntertaining and absorbing.
The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)Make no mistake about it: The Unburied is the real thing, or as close as a contemporary writer can get to the peculiar genius of Wilkie Collins....In its complex, beautifully balanced structure and its eccentric, almost hallucinatory characters it recalls Collins' Armadale and No Name. Steeped in delicious doom, it is both a fitting homage to the 'King of Romancers' and an amazing achievement in its own right.
Book EndsA triple layer cake of Victorian suspense awaits readers of The Unburied, a novel of intrigue and murder.
Library Journal (starred review)As with the bestselling The Quincunx, the reader is compulsively absorbed by tantalizing partial truths and vague foreshadowings....This riveting story is as much psychological thriller as it is mystery.
BooklistHis long awaited third novel won't disappoint...a gripping and provocative tale....This rich, hypnotic, cleverly constructed morality tale is must reading for both Victorian mystery lovers and for those who like literarily sophisticated crime novels.
The Independent (London)Although it has a spine-chilling opening, this novel is about a more complex intellectual investigation than ghost hunting...an analysis of attitudes to guilt, death and forgiveness, and of the nature of history itself.
Scotland on SundayThis tale of Victorian investigation combines erudition, style, and pace...informed and packed with watertight detailing...this is near faultless storytelling
-- a one-sitting feast.
The Evening Standard (London)The Unburied operates on three different levels. It is a big, fat murder mystery. It is a perfectly pitched pastiche of Victorian Gothic. And it is a metafictional exercise in which each aspect of the narrative comments on and complements every other....spine-tingling.
Kirkus ReviewsA complex puzzler...which is finely done.
The Daily Telegraph (London)This is the 1880s
-- gaslight, fog, expedient snowfalls, and skullduggery in a cathedral community. Once again Charles Palliser has served up a spanking story in which pace and atmosphere are given the ballast of intricate plotting....The Unburied will vastly satisfy those who feel that contemporary fiction is short on narrative skill and authorial guile.
