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Aug 21, 2017brangwinn rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
I chose to read this book because it was the 1990 Booker Prize winner. Did I enjoy it? Yes, but until I got about 150 pages into it, I found it easy to put down. But then, as a librarian, what’s wrong with a mystery that involves literary research in a university library? Boring, nerdy researchers as detectives, now that’s cool. Two, researchers, Roland and Maud, find a connection in the poets they are researching. The two 19th century poets were loves. Their relationship was only discovered as Roland perused a copy of a book owned by his research subject. What most fascinated me most was how the author could distinguish which part of the story took place in the Victorian age by the language which represents each period. That dexterity in language and the fact that the current research was done before the Internet and Google, was what made this book interesting.