Set in 1583 against a backdrop of religious-political intrigue and barbaric judicial reprisals,
Parris's compelling debut centers on real-life Giordano Bruno, a former Italian monk excommunicated by
the Roman Catholic church and hunted across Europe by the Inquisition for his belief in a heliocentric
infinite universe. Befriended by the charismatic English courtier and soldier Sir Philip Sidney, the
ambitious Bruno flees to more tolerant Protestant England, where Elizabeth I's secretary of state, Sir
Francis Walsingham, recruits him to spy, under the cover of philosophical disputation, on secretly
Catholic Oxford scholars suspected of plotting treason. As one Oxford fellow after another falls to
gruesome homicide, Bruno struggles to unravel Oxford's tangled loyalties. Parris (the pseudonym of
British journalist Stephanie Merritt) interweaves historical fact with psychological insight as Bruno,
a humanist dangerously ahead of his time, begins his quest to light the fire of enlightenment in Europe

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