After Hannibal - Softcover

Unsworth, Barry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140264396 ISBN 13: 9780140264395

Publisher: New York, Doubleday, 1997

Synopsis

Barry Unsworth, the Booker Prize-winning author of Sacred Hunger and the bestselling Morality Play, returns in top form with this worldly, bittersweet comedy of manners and morals set in one of Italy's most glorious--and historically treacherous--regions.

Golden Umbria is home to breathtaking scenery and great art; it is also where Hannibal and his invading band of Carthaginians ambushed and slaughtered a Roman legion, and where the local place-names still speak of that bloodshed.

Unsworth's contemporary invaders include the Greens, a retired American couple seeking serenity among the Umbrian hills, who are bilked out of their savings by the corrupt English "building expert" Stan Blemish; the Chapmans, a British property speculator and his wife, whose dispute with their neighbors over a wall escalates into a feud of nearly medieval proportions; Anders Ritter, a German haunted by the part his father played in a mass killing of Italian hostages in Rome during the Second World War; and Fabio and Arturo, a gay couple who, searching for peace and self-sufficiency, find treachery instead. And at the center of all these webs of deceit and greed is the cunning lawyer Mancini, happy to aid the disputants--and to exploit to the fullest the faith that these "innocents abroad" have placed in him.  

Mining his genius for historical narrative as well as his gift for sharp-eyed portraiture and deliciously droll storytelling, Barry Unsworth has written a marvelous entertainment.  After Hannibal is one of this remarkable author's finest creations.

About this title

Review

Barry Unsworth, who lives in Umbria, has chosen to set his latest novel, After Hannibal, among the wandering lanes and ancient fields he knows well. His cast of characters is a diverse bunch that includes a homosexual couple named Fabio and Arturo; a mentally unstable German named Ritter; the Greens, an American couple; the morose Italian historian Monti; and the Chapmans, a dull British couple at war with a local family, the Checchettis, over maintenance of a wall that fronts the country lane they both share. Unsworth uses geographical propinquity to link them all together and then throws in another common bond as well: the crafty lawyer Mancini, whom almost all have cause to consult at one time or another during the course of the novel.

Unsworth's darkly comic novel of greed, perfidy, and deceit occupies a landscape all too familiar with such things; Umbria is, after all, the place where Carthaginian invaders under Hannibal ambushed and slaughtered an entire Roman legion. Tactics have changed since the days of Hannibal, but the Umbria of After Hannibal is still a treacherous locale.

From the Publisher

Praise from England for After Hannibal

"Throughout After Hannibal you feel that here is a writer at the height of his powers, equally at ease with the big brush as with the small, taking considerable risks and pulling them off in a manner that's all the more impressive for being so unobtrusive."
--Sunday Telegraph

"A skillfully composed and beautifully written novel."
--Times Literary Supplement

"Few novelists now writing are anything like as reliably enjoyable as Barry Unsworth...There's very little the reviewer needs to say about his fiction, except: read it."
--The Spectator

About this edition

• Publisher: New York, Doubleday
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0140264396
• ISBN 13: 9780140264395
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256