Skip to content
King Solomon's Carpet

King Solomon's Carpet

The fifth Barbara Vine novel published by Viking in


I was sitting in the tube one day and it suddenly struck me to write a novel with a history of the London underground, and I got quite excited. I was running up and down the carriage looking at things. Looking out of the window at an impenetrable tunnel.

Ruth Rendell 1

Jarvis Stringer lives in a crumbling schoolhouse overlooking a tube line, compiling his obsessive, secret history of London’s Underground.

His presence and his strange house draw a band of misfits into his orbit: young Alice, who has run away from her husband and baby; Tom, the busker who rescues her; truant Jasper, who gets his kicks on the tube; and mysterious Axel, whose dark secret later casts a shadow over all of their lives.

Notes

Contemporary Reads 2

Footnotes

  1. Penguin Books interview, 2002. ↩︎

  2. Book links may earn this site a small commission. ↩︎