conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled The Fall of Troy about Times, Fall, Troy with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Engaging, disturbing, intellectually complex. The New York Times Book Review Engaging... sly, witty.... [A] novel that meditates on literature and idealism and the uses and misuses of both. Los Angeles Times This is the authors most exuberant novel for years Daily Mail Provoking, unsettling, ingeniousand a delight to read.Barry Unsworth, The Guardian Written in clipped, precise, instantly recognizable prose, The Fall of Troy is a novel about oppositesof truth and deception, fact and fiction, history and romance, love and loyalty.But however you read The Fall of Troy as a love story and mystery told in Homeric style, or as a deeper meditation on the relationship between reality and imaginationthe author the novelist re-emerges triumphantly from the mud of his excavations. The  Times The Fall of Troy is a clever variation on the story of the excavation of the city in the 1850s.There is another layer, however, to this tale of fakes, falsehood and deception. For the author is playing throughout his novel with the status of his own narrative as a work of fictionthere are unsettling surprises as the story dances between pure the author and the fantasies of Schliemann, and a treacherous middle-ground in between.the authors invention trumps even Schliemanns mendacity. Times Literary Supplement [the authors] evocation of the landscape, the weather and the conditions of the Hissarlik dig are brilliant, and his minor charactersare deftly brought to life. Above all, he manages to suggest, in a book which is less slight than it may appear, that men who meddle with the gods do so at their peril. Sunday Telegraph Ingeniousbriskly told and vividly realized talea gripping novel. Daily Express