by JamesMorrow (Author)
After crashing and burning during his PhD viva, Mason Ambrose is offered a large amount of money to come to the Isla de Sangre to instruct the daughter of wealthy Edwina Sabachtani. He is to use his knowledge as a philosopher to instil a conscience, a moral compass, in Edwina's daughter Londa following a diving accident which has supposedly destroyed her sense of right and wrong. Mason happily instructs her in schools of thought, from the stoics to the epicureans. But it is when he introduces her to the Beatitudes that the seeds of a rampaging sense of justice are sown and Londa becomes determined that the meek really shall inherit the earth! She becomes something of a 'celebrity saint' but then she takes her crusade too far, kidnapping a boat full of wealthy industrialists. A funny, tongue in cheek but also thought-provoking novel from the author of THE LAST WITCHFINDER that asks important questions about what makes us human and how we makes choices in a complex world.
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 368
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Published: 13 Mar 2008
ISBN 10: 0297853430
ISBN 13: 9780297853435
Book Overview: A cross between LOST and The Island of Dr Moreau but infused with a sense of humour! Will appeal to anyone who enjoyed The World According to Garp, even the futuristic scenes in Cloud Atlas. 'James Morrow's The Last Witchfinder is a dazzling novel about the clash between superstition and science. This is an extravagant, expansive, erudite, energetic feast of information and adventure.I felt as bound to read on as if tied to a stake myself' Sunday Telegraph 'James Morrow's novel about early witchcraft pulls off so many dazzling feats of literary magic that in a different century he'd have been burned at the stake. Forget The Crucible, Arthur Miller's dreary classic. The Last Witchfinder flies us back to that thrilling period when scientific rationalism was dropped into the great cauldron of intellectual history, boiling with prejudice, tradition, piety and fear' Washington Post