Recommendations from our site
“Stone’s Fall starts off in London and then it goes back in time, first to the crisis at Barings Bank in Paris in the 1890s and then to Venice in the 1860s, prior to Italian unification. What the book shows is the enveloping crisis of World War I and its European-wide context, hence the three countries it’s set in. Above all, it really reflects long and deeply on the underside of the fin de siècle and the Belle Epoque.” Read more...
The best books on The Dreyfus Affair and the Belle Epoque
Ruth Harris, Historian
Stone’s Fall, by the popular historical novelist Iain Pears, is a page-turner set in Europe in the decades before World War I. It was recommended by Ruth Harris, Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, in her interview on the Dreyfus Affair and the Belle Epoque. One caveat she mentions: “I’m going to confess right away that this is a novel written by my husband. The reason I chose it is that I know it so well and that he would be the first to say that much of it was taken from ideas that I have been thinking about for the last 25 years, and which he had rendered in fictional form.”
