Kirjahaku

William Darnell thought he had seen every kind of human conflict, every type of human tragedy, seen them in all their immense variety: murder done from envy, murder done for revenge, murder done for money, murder done for love, murder done after careful planning, murder done in a moment's rage. He had known, and defended, every kind of murderer, all of them, despite their differences, driven by the same desire, known since Cain slew Abel: the need to kill because, in their twisted imaginations, it was the only way their own lives would be worth living. He had known them all, and if there was something he had missed, it was in all probability now too late. But that was before he knew Adam and began the strangest case of his long career.It was not just the strangest case he had ever tried; it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.William Darnell had promised to retire after a trial in which the captain of a luxury yacht that went down in the Atlantic is charged with murder because of what had been done to survive during the forty days they were lost at sea. He breaks that promise to take a case that rescues from the oblivion of time the lost tribe of Atlantis that has somehow managed to survive on an island in the Pacific. The critically acclaimed Evangeline was about the trials of the human soul; The Dark Backward tells a tale about both the limits, and the power, of the human imagination. It leaves you with the question whether Atlantis was nothing more than an ancient myth, or might still exist. William Darnell, to his own astonishment, discovers that what he had always believed was wrong.

Helen is a novel about ancient Greece from the age of Pericles to the end, or what was tantamount to the end, of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides wrote the history of the war and Plato wrote the dialogues which, along with the writings of Xenophon, are the main sources of what we know about Socrates and the origins of Greek philosophy. There are only a few allusions to the war in what Plato wrote and the history of Thucydides never mentions Socrates. Helen attempts to combine both the war and this new thing, this new way of looking at the world, which Socrates brought into being. Helen is the story of what Socrates was and what Athens became, the peak of ancient history and the peak of ancient, and perhaps not just ancient, thought, both of them together the origin and source of western civilization. No one has attempted to write such a novel before.The story is told through the eyes of a young woman, Helen, the daughter of the tyrant who ruled over Syracuse, the dominant city in Sicily. With the help of Herodotus, from whom she learns that there are different nations with different ways of life, a lesson which leads to the question about what the best way of life might be, she escapes the violence of her father. She finds a home with Empedocles, the pre-Socrates philosopher who for a time was the leader of the democracy in Agrigento, the second leading power in Sicily. From Empedocles she learns what the various pre-Socratics taught, but none of this satisfies her desire to understand the world. When Empedocles is forced to flee Sicily, she finds her way to Athens where she becomes the close confidant of Aspasia, the wife of Pericles. The first time she is invited to their home, she meets Socrates, the strangest man she has ever seen, and Alcibiades, who is easily the most attractive. Helen, a young woman of astonishing beauty and intelligence, is able to see everything that happens and through her relationship with Alcibiades and Socrates, to understand the real meaning of what she sees...