Iain Pears Books In Order

Publication Order of Jonathan Argyll Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Iain Pears is an English novelist, journalist, and art historian. He is best known for writing his Jonathan Argyll/Art History Mystery series.

He was born on 1st January, the year 1955, in Coventry town in the United Kingdom. During his childhood he was a very focused student and he took his education seriously. He would attend Warwick for junior and then high school education. Iain worked hard to pass his high school education and as a result, he was able to secure a chance at Wadham College where he started pursuing his college education.

However, Iain Pears did not end up completing his college education at Wadham College and ended up heating to Wolfson College, located at Oxford. This is where he pursued a career in journalism.

Pears was a journalist and art historian before becoming an author. He worked as a reporter at two media stations in the United Kingdom, Channel 4 and BBC. As a journalist, he not only worked in his home country, but also he worked at ZDF, a media station in Germany. Iain was also a Reuters’ correspondent in France, Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom from 1982 to 1990. In 1987, Pears was at Yale University where he became a Getty fellow in the Humanities and Arts.

In the middle of the 1990s, Iain Pears started writing, but he didn’t really experience his breakthrough in writing until the year 1997. This was when his bestselling book “An Instance of the Fingerpost” was released. “An Instance of the Fingerpost” has since been translated to multiple different languages. He was able to gain a lot of popularity as a result of the book.

In the year 2002, Pears published the book “The Dream of Scipio”, which has three stories interwoven within it. In 2009, he published another book called “Stone’s Fall” which featured three stories told backwards. Iain Pears has also written a novel series that features an art historian, Jonathan Argyll.

Pears and his wife currently live in Oxford, United Kingdom with their children.

An Instance of the Fingerpost takes place in England in the 1660s. The story begins as Charles II has been returned to the throne in the years after the civil war has ended and Cromwell’s short-lived republic has failed. The story takes place in Oxford which is the intellectual seat of the country and a place where the great scientific, religious, and political ferment.

The story begins when a fellow of New College is found dead under mysterious circumstances and a young woman is accused of his murder. There are four witnesses who each have their own version of what went down, but it is only one them that reveals an extraordinary truth.

The Raphael Affair is the first book in the Art History Mystery series. The story introduces us to Jonathan Argyll who is an enthusiastic young art scholar from England. Argyll has his suspicions about a long-lost Raphael painting which have lead him to a small church in Rome. The painting is gone from the site though and has since been purchased and restored for placement at Rome’s National Museum. However, the Raphael is destroyed in a fire soon after which raises his suspicions. He starts to wonder about the authenticity of the burned Raphael as well as the innocence of everyone who has came into contact with it since.

The second book in the Art History series is The Titian Committee and continues to appeal to art history buffs. The story begins when a murderer strikes an American member of the Titian Committee in Venice. This brings in General Taddeo Bottando of Rome’s art-theft squad who decides to dispatch his special assistant Flavia to investigate. The case looks to be a simple political mission, but ends up being anything but. The case turns out to be much more dangerous and becomes a quest to find a missing portrait that was attributed to Titian. Flavia ends up enlisting the aid of Jonathan Argyll to continue the investigation.

Stone’s Fall is a standalone novel by Pears which begins with a man named John Stone falling out of his window to his death. Stone was a financier and arms dealer with a ton of wealth to his name that he used to manipulate markets and industries to suit his needs. The question of his death becomes whether it was suicide or something else. In order to find out, his widow hires a young crime reporter to investigate. Her investigation will take her backward in time from from London in 1909 to Paris in 1890 and finally to Venice in 1867 as she look to uncover the truth about what happened against the backdrop of the evolution of European high-stakes international finance. An era that lead to Europe’s first great age of espionage and kicked off the arms race of the twentieth century.

Pears is also the author of Arcadia. The book takes place in Cold War England where Professor Henry Lytten has renounced his career in espionage with the intention of writing a fantasy novel. The world he imagines is less fraught than his own and offers a lot of hope. He’ll meet a young neighbor, Rosie, who turns out turns out to be an unlikely confidante. The two meet when she is chasing after his cat and ends up stumbling into his cellar – and into a fantasy world that is quite similar to the book that he is writing. In this place, Rosie meets a young boy named Ethan who will lead them on a journey that will change both of their lives.

Then, in a distopian society where progress is controlled by the ruling elite, a scientist named Angela has discovered the potential of a powerful new machine. Her discovery brings the authorities to her door which will force her to make an important decision that will have consequences across all the different worlds.

2 Responses to “Iain Pears”

1. Beth Evans: 3 years ago

   After reading few of Iain Pears’ novels, may I say they are most enjoyable, especially as he does not seem to suffer from the abject fear of the common adverb as so many fiction writers apparently do.

   Reply
2. david scott: 3 years ago

   So when is your next novel getting published?
   It’s been far too long since Arcadia was published.
   PLEASE write a new novel.

   Reply