Alan Wall Bücher

Aus dem Englischen von Irene Rumler. Nirgendwo hält Christopher Bayliss es lange aus, weder im römischen Priesterseminar noch an der Universität von Leeds, geschweige denn bei seinen wechselnden Freundinnen. Doch als er bei seinen Literaturstudien auf einen für wahnsinnig erklärten Dichter des 18. Jahrhunderts stößt, ist dies der Anfang einer langjährigen Obsession - und einer Reise in die finstersten Bezirke der Aufklärung.

A first novel of remarkable ingenuity, Bless the Thief is a fast-paced literary mystery involving a secret society, art forgery, and the Hindenburg disaster. Born to an American mother and a British father, Tom Lynch lives with his mother in America until she sends him off to his appointed guardian in England, Patrick Grimshaw. Grimshaw becomes a surrogate father to Tom, who never knew his real father, and he inducts Tom into the mysterious Delaquay Society, an organization based on the works of Alfred Delaquay, a book illustrator of considerable genius and perversity. The books Delaquay illustrated were produced by hand, seldom in editions of more than one, and their reproduction or sale is prohibited by the Society. As its youngest-ever English secretary, Tom becomes increasingly involved with the Delaquay Society, until a breach of the Society's conventions of secrecy blows apart its hermetic and obsessively closed world and he is caught up in the resulting chaos. As the manner of his life begins to exact a heavy toll, so the Society takes its own terrible revenge, and Tom Lynch comes finally to understand who he really is and where he came from.