The Manuscript Found in Saragossa

Nov 24, 2025 12:50 PM

Author:Jan Potocki,Ian MacLean,Ian MacLean

Alphonse, a young Walloon officer, is travelling to join his regiment in Madrid in 1739. But he soon finds himself mysteriously detained at a highway inn in the strange and varied company of thieves, brigands, cabbalists, noblemen, coquettes and gypsies, whose stories he records over sixty-six days. The resulting manuscript is discovered some forty years later in a sealed casket, from which tales of characters transformed through disguise, magic and illusion, of honour and cowardice, of hauntings and seductions, leap forth to create a vibrant polyphony of human voices. Jan Potocki (1761-1812) used a range of literary styles - gothic, picaresque, adventure, pastoral, erotica - in his novel of stories-within-stories, which, like the Decameron and Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, provides entertainment on an epic scale.

Reviews

History and legend combine in an epic recreation of the Troy myth

—— Conn Iggulden

David Gemmell carries us away to a four-cornered, wholly convincing cosmos, so masterfully done that the reader thinks, 'Ah this is what it was really like'

—— Steven Pressfield

Gripping and fast-paced, intelligent and intensely readable... should appeal to anyone who enjoys an action-packed historical epic

—— Joanne Harris

The loyalties and betrayals, the love and the hate, the endless, everlasting courage of the men - and the women - of both sides are brought to life in this vivid, inspirational recreation of the Troy myth

—— Manda Scott

'Gruesomely entertaining ... intellectually fascinating'

—— Daily Mail

'A tragi-comedy of elegant and unrelieved blackness'

—— Sunday Telegraph

'Erudite and compelling... Genuinely hard to put down'

—— Sunday Times

'Wilson has always been a brilliant storyteller, who - unlike many of his no less famous contemporaries - is incapable of ever writing a boring line... Masterly... Always enthralling... Here is a book one races through, so eager is one to know what happens next... In [Wilson's] hands, as in James's, each turn of the screw succeeds in intensifying the reader's unease'

—— Francis King , Literary Review

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