An Instance of the Fingerpost Iain Pears (1997) Not a book for students - my hardback edition runs to 698 pages and, being set in the Seventeenth Century, the text is littered with archaic language. Apart from that, the plot is fiendishly complicated, involving four different versions of the same basic events, as seen by four very different characters. This is because the novel is a kind of historical whodunit - but...