Quicksilver: Neal Stephenson

Including a cast of characters such as Newton, Leibniz, Christopher Wren, Charles II, Cromwell and the young Benjamin Franklin, this book shows the ability to get inside a place and time; and more. An endlessly rich and inventive historical fiction epic from the author of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, set amid the political intrigue, scientific revolution and religious conflict of 17th-century Europe. As philosophers, adventurers and spies navigate a rapidly changing world, fortunes are made and empires reshaped.‘Genius … You’ll wish it were longer.’ Time magazine‘An astonishing achievement.’ Sunday TelegraphWINNER OF THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD---------Daniel Waterhouse, fearless thinker and conflicted Puritan, moves among the era's greatest minds, as new ideas challenge old certainties, and where the world can be changed overnight.The adventurer ‘Half-Cocked Jack’ escapes the streets of London and pursues fortune and infamy while the pox slowly tightens its grip.And Eliza, rescued from a Turkish harem, reinvents herself as a spy, financier and pawn of the powerful, as the age of finance is born.'Neal Stephenson rewrites history – for the dark prince of hacker fiction, looking backward is another way of seeing the future.’ WiredThe first book in the Baroque Cycle.