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Sparrow by James Hynes (Picador, 2023)
Historical Fiction
Sparrow is a boy, of unknown origins, raised in a brothel on the Spanish coast in the waning years of the Roman Empire. This is a story of identity, corruption, abandonment, written by Sparrow, on papyrus that he fully expects to moulder and disintegrate. But he makes his unknown reader a promise: “I will never lie to you. My life may have been wanton, but my page is virtuous”.(ISBN: 9781529092394, hardback.)