Iain Pears

Iain Pears is an art historian, novelist and journalist. He was born in Coventry and currently lives in Oxford with his wife and two sons. Before writing, he worked as a reporter for various media outlets, such as the BBC and Reuters.

He is the writer of the international bestseller, An Instance of the Fingerpost, published by Vintage in 1997, which is also in development as a serial for the BBC. His other publications include the philosophical novel The Dream of Scipio (Vintage, 2002) and the crime thriller The Portrait (Riverhead Books, 2005). His historical-mystery Stone’s Fall (Vintage, 2009) is a tripartite novel set in the sophisticated world of finance in Venice, Paris and London during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The ground-breaking novel Arcadia (2015) was published by Faber and Knopf US as a novel and as an app. It won App of the Year at The Future Book Awards and was shortlisted for an Independent Publishers Guild Award for Digital Publishing and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction. He has also written a novel series revolving around Jonathan Argyll, a detective art historian.

Iain’s latest book, Parallel Lives, published in May 2025 by William Collins, tells the simplest tale in the world. Two people meet and fall in love. But the route which brought Larissa Salmina and Francis Haskell to a backstreet Venetian restaurant in 1962 was anything but straightforward.

Photo courtesy of Lucinda Stevens