Pompeii

Acclaim for Robert Harris’s Pompeii, the #1 international bestseller

“Blazingly exciting . . . Pompeii palpitates with sultry tension. . . . Harris provides an awe-inspiring tour of one of the monumental engineering triumphs on which the Roman empire was based. . . . What makes this novel all but unputdownable . . . is the bravura fictional flair that crackles through it. Brilliantly evoking the doomed society pursuing its ambitions and schemes in the shadow of a mountain that nobody knew was a volcano, Harris, as Vesuvius explodes, gives full vent to his genius for thrilling narrative. Fast-paced twists and turns alternate with nightmarish slow-motion scenes (desperate figures struggling to wade thigh-deep through slurries of pumice towards what they hope will be safety). Harris’s unleashing of the furnace ferocities of the eruption’s terminal phase turns his book’s closing sequences into pulse-rate-speeding masterpieces of suffocating suspense and searing action. It is hard to imagine a more thoroughgoingly enjoyable thriller.”—London Sunday Times

“Breakneck pace, constant jeopardy and subtle twists of plot . . . a blazing blockbuster . . . The depth of the research in the book is staggering.”—Daily Mail

“[A] stirring and absorbing novel. . . . The final 100 pages are terrific, as good as anything Harris has done; and the last, teasing paragraph, done with the lightest of touches, is masterly.”—The Sunday Telegraph

“The long-drawn-out death agony of [Pompeii and Herculaneum]—a full day of falling ash, pumice stone, and then, the final catastrophe, a cloud of poisonous gas—is brilliantly done. Explosive stuff, indeed.”—The Daily Telegraph