Plato’s Reckoning

Synopsis

From the James Tait Black-winning author of Justine and The Book Collector – a slave-scribe in the household of Plato confronts the cost of obedience.

Athens, 404 BC. For ten years Thalia, captured in war and sold into the household of the philosopher Plato, has been his scribe – taking down his sentences before he has finished thinking them. She has learned to be useful, to be quiet, and to be forgotten in a room. Now the city has fallen. Plato’s cousin Critias has seized power, and the household is no longer a refuge. A tutor walks the courtyard at night. A slave-girl unsettles even her mistress. A brother labours, half-forgotten, in the silver mines. And somewhere in the gaps between what Thalia writes down and what she remembers, a question is gathering that she will not be allowed to leave unanswered.

Praise for Previous Work

‘(On The Existential Detective) One of the most original and formidable writers in the English language today.’ —Sunday Herald

‘The intellectual future of British writing.’ —Ali Smith

‘(On The Existential Detective) Haunting, strange, Kafkaesque, poetic.’ —Ian Rankin

‘The Book Collector throws the essential elements of the gothic chiller into a blender and what emerges is something between pastiche and critique, in which its author never loses sight of the need to give her readers, first and foremost, an unputdownable yarn.’ —Alastair Mabbott, The Herald

‘Burnt Island is steeped in self-awareness, as a book about the process and effect of writing might be. It seems connected by literary electricity to other tales of isolation: The Shining, Pincher Martin, The Sea, The Sea.’ —John Self, The Guardian