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| | International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award |
 | | Responding to a cryptic summons to a remote country house, London bookseller Isaac Inchbold finds himself responsible for restoring a magnificent library pillaged during the English Civil War, and in the process slipping from the surface of 1660s London into an underworld of spies and smugglers, ciphers and forgeries. |
 | | As he assembles the fragments of a complex historical mystery, Inchbold learns how Sir Ambrose Plessington, founder of the library, escaped from Bohemia on the eve of the Thirty Years War with plunder from the Imperial Library. |
 | | Ross King's novel, Ex-Libris, focuses on the 1660s, after those wars, but in a parallel narrative he links events in the 1660s with those of the initial outbreak of the great wars, in Bohemia, in 1620. |
| www.impacdublinaward.ie /2000longlist/EXLIBRIS.HTM (516 words) |
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