Q

Across the first half of the 16th century, an Anabaptist radical who changes his name from city to city throws himself into the upheavals of the Protestant Reformation, from the Peasants' War in Germany to the siege of Münster to the printing houses of Venice. Shadowing him through every defeat is Q, a spy and informer working for the inquisitorial cardinal Giovanni Pietro Carafa, who manipulates the radical movements from within to crush them. The two men never quite see each other, yet their thirty-year duel shapes the fate of the heretical currents tearing Europe apart. Written collectively under the Luther Blissett pseudonym, the novel reads as both a period thriller and a meditation on revolution, surveillance, and belief.