“Paul Griffiths movingly explores the primary need for attentiveness in our lives, how impossible that is for us to maintain and how art can help us grasp the contradiction… rich grounds for reflection.” – Gabriel Josipovici, The TLS
The Tomb Guardians awake to find the tomb empty and one of their number missing. Their conversation overlaps with another – an anguished lecturer and friend exploring the Renaissance Master portraits they occupy. One looks back at the dawn of the Reformation, the other thrashes out an excuse.
Author of Mr. Beethoven (The Goldsmiths Prize 2020 shortlist; The Walter Scott Prize 2021 and Republic of Consciousness Prize 2021 longlists), Paul Griffiths sustains this theme: the power of the imagination to unlock history.
Praise for The Tomb Guardians
“Given Griffiths’s career as a librettist and musicologist, a distinctly Da Ponte-ish symmetry between “high” and “low” voices and a certain exactitude of pacing and weight, it is tempting to postulate music as a suggestive absence in the book, a kind of dark matter that might fill and charge the spaces between and alongside the words.” – Keith Miller, The TLS
“This is a layered book weaved on that threshold between faith and doubt. At the same time, it manages to be humorous, gripping, and energetic.” – Nathan Munday, Wales Arts Review
“It is hard to overstate just how skilfully these two exchanges are combined… I would love to see it on stage.” – Gertrud Sollars, Transforming Ministry
“There is no doubt that this is in a different league. Drop the Booker book you’re reading and read this instead.” – Paul Fulcher
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