Lawrence Norfolk : The Pope's rhinoceros

A story of adventure enthralling in its scope and inventiveness, by turns comic and horrific, zestful and elegiac, involving a reclusive order of monks whose church is slowly sliding into the sea; Renaissance Rome with its sexual licence and political rivalries; war and atrocity in the Central Italian States; and a remote tribe in the West African rainforest. Running through this variegated fable is the search for the rhinoceros. The exuberance, the sheer proliferation of incident and scene, are disciplined and controlled by unerring narrative pace and cunning'.

Barry Unsworth, Daily Telegraph

'Spell-binding entertainment, richly imagined, painstakingly researched, superbly paced and utterly gripping'

Michael Dibdin, Independent on Sunday

'Bawdy baroque-punk prose of marvellous fluency, overlaid with a gloss of heavy-weight erudition ... an astonishing achievement, little short of a masterpiece'

William Dalrymple, Independent on Sunday

'A gargantuan, dazzling fable by Britain's brightest young writer'

Steven Poole, Guardian