Description: With his trademark elegance and intelligence, Robert Harris re-creates a world on the brink of disaster. The engineer in charge of the aqueduct bringing fresh water into the Mediterranean cities seems to be the only one worried about failing springs and cracks in the system.
Review Quotes: Acclaim for Robert Harris's Pompeii, the #1 international bestseller
"Blazingly exciting . . . Pompeii palpitates with sultry tension. . . . Harris provides an awe-inspiring tour of one of the monumental engineering triumphs on which the Roman empire was based. . . . What makes this novel all but unputdownable . . . is the bravura fictional flair that crackles through it. Brilliantly evoking the doomed society pursuing its ambitions and schemes in the shadow of a mountain that nobody knew was a volcano, Harris, as Vesuvius explodes, gives full vent to his genius for thrilling narrative. Fast-paced twists and turns alternate with nightmarish slow-motion scenes (desperate figures struggling to wade thigh-deep through slurries of pumice towards what they hope will be safety). Harris's unleashing of the furnace ferocities of the eruption's terminal phase turns his book's closing sequences into pulse-rate-speeding masterpieces of suffocating suspense and searing action. It is hard to imagine a more thoroughgoingly enjoyable thriller."--London Sunday Times "Breakneck pace, constant jeopardy and subtle twists of plot . . . a blazing blockbuster . . . The depth of the research in the book is staggering."--Daily Mail "[A] stirring and absorbing novel. . . . The final 100 pages are terrific, as good as anything Harris has done; and the last, teasing paragraph, done with the lightest of touches, is masterly."--The Sunday Telegraph "The long-drawn-out death agony of [Pompeii and Herculaneum]--a full day of falling ash, pumice stone, and then, the final catastrophe, a cloud of poisonous gas--is brilliantly done. Explosive stuff, indeed."--The Daily Telegraph