The King at the Edge of the World by Arthur Phillips

One is reminded of Hilary Mantel's magisterial Wolf Hall but perhaps more pointedly of Graham Greene's novels. The Washington PostĪ rare combination of literary finesse and quick-paced plot and another triumph from the versatile Phillips. Minneapolis Star TribuneĪrthur Phillips fans will recognize and new readers will thrill to the immersive mix of erudition, brio, and heart in The King at the Edge of the World. The novel is brilliant textured, witty and Shakespeare-deep with palace intrigue, lust, conspiracy, xenophobia and Iago-level villainy. Phillips writes with such breadth, intelligence and wit. The New York Times Book Reviewĭarkly entertaining. Sentence by sentence, the book blends the leanness of a taut thriller with the marbled fatness of Elizabethan prose. Its plot is an intricate set of intersecting mechanisms and locks and keys, which, when they finally all fall into place, provide the reader with the gawping satisfaction of having been well and truly fooled. Arthur Phillips returns with a unique and thrilling novel that will leave readers questioning the nature of truth at every turn.Ī rich, old-fashioned spy thriller set in Elizabethan England. He will do almost anything to return home to his wife and son. The perfect man for the job, Ezzedine is the ultimate outsider, stranded on this cold, wet, and primitive island. Belloc enlists Mahmoud Ezzedine, a Muslim physician left behind by the last diplomatic visit from the Ottoman Empire, as his undercover agent. With time running out, London confronts a seemingly impossible question: What does James truly believe? It falls to Geoffrey Belloc, a secret warrior from the hottest days of England s religious battles, to devise a test to discover the true nature of King James s soul. He has every reason to claim to be a Protestant, but if he secretly shares his family s Catholicism, then forty years of religious war will have been for nothing, and a bloodbath will ensue. The queen s spymasters hardened veterans of a long war on terror and religious extremism fear that James is not what he appears. The leading candidate is King James VI of Scotland, but there is a problem. Potential successors secretly maneuver to be in position when the inevitable occurs.

It is a capital crime even to think that Elizabeth will ever die. The Wall Street Journal NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND THE WASHINGTON POST The year is 1601. Queen Elizabeth s spymasters recruit an unlikely agent the only Muslim in England for an impossible mission in a mesmerizing novel from one of the best writers in America ( The Washington Post) Evokes flashes of Hilary Mantel, John le Carré and Graham Greene, but the wry, tricky plot that drives it is pure Arthur Phillips.

The King at the Edge of the World by Arthur Phillips