An Instance of the Fingerpost
Oxford, 1663. A fellow of New College is found poisoned, and a local servant girl named Sarah Blundy stands accused of his murder. Iain Pears refracts the case through four successive narrators, an Italian medical student, the son of a disgraced royalist, the cryptographer John Wallis, and the antiquary Anthony Wood, each certain of his own version and quietly unreliable about everyone else's. As the testimonies layer and contradict, the novel becomes less a whodunit than an inquiry into how knowledge is made in a century inventing science, espionage, and modern law at once. Dense, learned, and slyly funny, it rewards readers willing to weigh evidence the way its characters do, with care and a touch of suspicion.
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The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
An Oxford don is poisoned in Restoration-era England. Four men, a Venetian doctor, an angry Englishman, an antiquarian, and a historian, each tell the story their own way, agreeing on almost nothing.
An Instance of the Fingerpost is fictional but set in real 1660s Oxford and includes historical figures including Robert Boyle and John Locke. Iain Pears researched the period extensively, and the novel is admired for its atmosphere of post-Civil War English politics.
Yes. The novel is roughly 700 pages and uses period prose styles for each of its four narrators, including a 17th-century natural philosopher and an unreliable historian. The story rewards close attention but demands it.
An Instance of the Fingerpost was written by Iain Pears, published in 1997 by Penguin Random House.
An Instance of the Fingerpost is 698 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, An Instance of the Fingerpost takes most readers 10 to 15 hours to finish.
An Instance of the Fingerpost is a standalone novel by Iain Pears, not part of a series.
An Instance of the Fingerpost is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
