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Quicksilver
  • Published: 1 October 2004
  • ISBN: 9780099410683
  • Imprint: Arrow
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 944
  • RRP: $45.00

Quicksilver

Formats & editions
EBook
31 May 2012
Paperback
1 Oct 2004
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The first novel in Neal Stephenson's acclaimed Baroque Cycle.

An endlessly rich and inventive historical fiction epic from the author of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, set amid the political intrigue, scientific revolution and religious conflict of 17th-century Europe. As philosophers, adventurers and spies navigate a rapidly changing world, fortunes are made and empires reshaped.

‘Genius … You’ll wish it were longer.’ Time magazine

‘An astonishing achievement.’ Sunday Telegraph

WINNER OF THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD

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Daniel Waterhouse, fearless thinker and conflicted Puritan, moves among the era's greatest minds, as new ideas challenge old certainties, and where the world can be changed overnight.

The adventurer ‘Half-Cocked Jack’ escapes the streets of London and pursues fortune and infamy while the pox slowly tightens its grip.

And Eliza, rescued from a Turkish harem, reinvents herself as a spy, financier and pawn of the powerful, as the age of finance is born.

'Neal Stephenson rewrites history – for the dark prince of hacker fiction, looking backward is another way of seeing the future.’ Wired

The first book in the Baroque Cycle.
  • Published: 1 October 2004
  • ISBN: 9780099410683
  • Imprint: Arrow
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 944
  • RRP: $45.00

About the author

Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson is the bestselling author of Reamde, Anathem; the three-volume historical epic the Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World); Cryptonomicon; The Diamond Age; Snow Crash, which was named one of Time magazine's top one hundred all-time best English-language novels; and Zodiac. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
portrait photo of Neal Stephenson

Also by Neal Stephenson

The System Of The World
The Confusion
Cobweb
Interface
Zodiac
Cryptonomicon
The Diamond Age
See all

Praise for Quicksilver

Staggering diversity and detail ... An astonishing achievement.

Sunday Telegraph

A great, heaving countryside of a book...consistently funny...fluent and elusive, while retaining just the right hint of poison

Telegraph

Stephenson mixes a library’s worth of ideas with compulsive derring-do … its scope and inventiveness become addictive.

Time Out

A breathless ride…the writing gives an immersive sense of time and place

Face

A brilliant, bulging historical novel ... Thrillingly accomplished ... Magnificent ... one finishes it already eager to begin the sequel

Guardian

[A] massive tour-de-force- Dense, witty, erudite, packed with fascinating characters, and gripping despite a distended length, Quicksilver is both a worthy prequel to Cryptonomicon, and an indication that Stephenson's Baroque Cycle is shaping up to be a far more impressive literary endeavour than most so-called "serious" fiction - No scholarly, and intellectually provocative, historical novel has been this much fun since The Name of the Rose.

Charles Shaar Murray, Independent