Q Book

A bestseller across Europe, Q is a hugely ambitious and brilliantly achieved novel set in the chaos of Reformation Europe.

In 1517 Martin Luther nails his 95 theses demanding reform of the Catholic Church to the door of the cathedral church in Wittenburg, setting off the period of upheaval, war, and violence we now know as the Reformation. During the reigns of the Habsburg Charles V and his enemy the French king Francis I, the Papacy desperately struggles to secure its position and undermine its political opponents.

Meanwhile, as declared foes of the Roman Church, the radical Protestant Anabaptists are in rebellion against an entire order of European society and are persecuted and brutalized by those outside their sphere.

In this age devastated by the wars of religion, a young theology student adopts the cause of the heretics and the disinherited. Across the chessboard of Europe, from the German plains to the flourishing Dutch cities and south to Venice, our hero, an Anabaptist who travels under many names, and his enemy, Q, a papal informer and heretic hunter, play a game in which no moves are forbidden. What begins as a struggle to reveal each other's identity eventually becomes part of a much greater mission: to destroy and achieve domination over each other.

Part thriller, part novel of ideas, Q is as richly imagined as Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose or Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost and as subversively political as Michel Houellebecq's Atomised.

The Washington Post - David Liss

At its best, Q displays an impressive knowledge of the Reformation, its ideas and its principal actors. It is a historical novel of the grand and sweeping sort, one that aims to capture not a life or a moment, but an era of pivotal importance. The authors have gone to great lengths to include information about important figures of the Reformation -- Luther, Philipp Melanchthon and John Calvin -- as well as some significant sites of Protestant foment, including the heady events at Munster and the disaster of Thomas Muntzer's revolt at Frankenhausen.