Iain Pears

Iain Pears is an English novelist and art historian, born in 1955 in Coventry and educated at Oxford, where he later returned to live. Before turning to fiction full time he worked as a Reuters correspondent and BBC and Channel 4 reporter. He is known for a series of detective novels featuring art historian Jonathan Argyll, and for ambitious, structurally experimental literary novels including An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997), his international breakthrough, and The Dream of Scipio (2002). Arcadia (2015) pushed the experiment further, structured to let readers move between its multiple interwoven narratives in different orders. Pears's fiction is distinguished by its historical range and its interest in how the same events look entirely different depending on whose account you trust.