The Pope's Rhinoceros

'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

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

A story of adventure enthralling in its scope and inventiveness, by turns comic and horrific, zestful and elegaic, involving a reclusive order of monks whose church is slowly sliding into the sea; Renaissance Rome with its sexual license and political rivalries; war and atrocity in the Central Italian States; and a remote tribe in the West African rain forest. 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

A truly fabulous piece of new British fiction

Lawrence Norfolk was born in London in 1963. He has written four novels of historical fiction.

In February 1516, a Portugese ship sank with the loss of all hands a mile off the coast of Italy. The Nostra Senora da Adjuda had sailed 14000 miles from the Indian kingdom Gujarat: her mission, to deliver a rhinoceros to the Pope. The Pope's Rhinoceros tells the stories which culminate in this bizarre incident. Ranging from the Baltic Sea to a flyblown colony in India, from a tribe hidden in the African rain forest to atrocities committed in an obscure town in Tuscany, Norfolk's brilliant novel holds up the true history of the rhinoceros as a mirror to the fantasies and obsessions of the Renaissance.

Lawrence Norfolk

Historical fiction of mesmerizing complexity... It is a masterpiece

A love story and a story of fantastic adventure, it is also a hugely comic novel

A dazzling linguistic and formal achievment

Poised, superbly inventive and gripping. With Lemprière's Dictionary the precocious author has catapulted himself into the premier league of English fiction writing

Extravagantly spectacular...myriad wonders and pleasures abound....superbly entertaining

An extraordinary achievement...a remarkable work

Brilliantly inventive and hugely enjoyable

As the seventeenth century opens, a band of venturers forms the Honourable Company of Merchants trading from England to the East Indies. In France, the siege of La Rochelle ends with the massacre of thirty thousand men, women and children. Almost two centuries later, in 1788, John Lemprière published his classical dictionary. This much is fact. Lawrence Norfolk tells us how the first two events led, inescapably, to the third. 
 
This amazing tale encompasses the Great Voyages of Discovery and multinational financial conspiracies, and leads a motley cast of scholars and eccentrics, drunk aristocrats and whores, assassins and octogenarian pirates through two centuries and three continents to the brink of French Revolution. 
 
John Lemprière reluctantly enters this world as an introverted scholar, obsessed by the myths of antiquity. At the end of this astonishing story he understands that it takes far more than learning to lay the ghosts of the past to rest.

Lawrence Norfolk

Praise for Lemprière’s Dictionary

Historical fiction of mesmerizing complexity... It is a masterpiece

A love story and a story of fantastic adventure, it is also a hugely comic novel

A dazzling linguistic and formal achievment

Historical fiction of mesmerizing complexity... It is a masterpiece

A love story and a story of fantastic adventure, it is also a hugely comic novel

A dazzling linguistic and formal achievment

Historical fiction of mesmerizing complexity... It is a masterpiece

A love story and a story of fantastic adventure, it is also a hugely comic novel

A dazzling linguistic and formal achievment

Books by Lawrence Norfolk

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