Marcus Sinclair is a history teacher whose life is stuck in neutral when he inherits a papyrus scroll from his antiquarian uncle. The mysterious scroll might contain a lost masterpiece from ancient Rome or perhaps an ancient recipe for personal tranquility, but its unreadable unless Marcus can figure out a way to unroll the scroll without destroying it. His quest takes him to Naples, where he befriends a Google software engineer days before the man is found dead. Marcus is interviewed by an investigative journalist, Kristi Grainger, and they find themselves on parallel paths leading to a Neapolitan trafficker in antiquities, a tech mogul obsessed with the distant past, and a clutch of academics searching for the lost library of Herculaneum. In a seaside city that is by turns lush and lethal, Marcus must confront the unravelling of more than a scroll. This novel is inspired by a real place the Villa dei Papri, the only library from antiquity to have survived and coincides with the Vesuvius Challenge, a reallife international competition to decipher Herculaneum scrolls.

Binding: Paperback;240 pages; Publisher: ECW Press,Canada; Classification: FF; Weight: 414 g; Dimensions: 215 x 141 x 16

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