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    The Book of Air and Shadows: A Novel
    The Book of Air and Shadows: A Novel
    The Book of Air and Shadows: A Novel
    Audiobook18 hours

    The Book of Air and Shadows: A Novel

    Written by Michael Gruber

    Narrated by Stephen Hoye

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    "Tap-tapping the keys and out come the words on this little screen, and who will read them I hardly know. I could be dead by the time anyone actually gets to read them, as dead as, say, Tolstoy. Or Shakespeare. Does it matter, when you read, if the person who wrote still lives?"

    These are the words of Jake Mishkin, whose seemingly innocent job as an intellectual property lawyer has put him at the center of a deadly conspiracy and a chase to find a priceless treasure involving William Shakespeare. As he awaits a killer-or killers-unknown, Jake writes an account of the events that led to this deadly endgame, a frantic chase that began when a fire in an antiquarian bookstore revealed the hiding place of letters containing a shocking secret, concealed for four hundred years. In a frantic race from New York to England and Switzerland, Jake finds himself matching wits with a shadowy figure who seems to anticipate his every move. What at first seems like a thrilling puzzle waiting to be deciphered soon turns into a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse, where no one-not family, not friends, not lovers-is to be trusted.

    Moving between twenty-first-century America and seventeenth-century England, The Book of Air and Shadows is a modern thriller that brilliantly re-creates William Shakespeare's life at the turn of the seventeenth century and combines an ingenious and intricately layered plot with a devastating portrait of a contemporary man on the brink of self-discovery...or self-destruction.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 15, 2007
    ISBN9781400174492
    Author

    Michael Gruber

    New York Times bestselling author Michael Gruber is the author of five acclaimed novels. He lives in Seattle.

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    Reviews for The Book of Air and Shadows

    3.5/5

    67 ratings65 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Enjoyable, though I could have done without the bigotry and overuse of sex. Perhaps Gruber is trying to add "color" with all the Italian/Jewish/Russian personalities, but all of that could have been removed and the book would be none the worse for it, in my opinion. Just saying someone is Irish or Italian doesn't tell me much, usually, and yet it's a defining characteristic for Gruber. I'm hoping this is just old-school thinking, and will pass away along with Gruber's generation. I nearly gave up on it early on during the extended descriptions of Jake's sexual addiction. We get it, he's got a problem, you've made your point...can we move on? The historical documents lent a lot of interest to the book, making it seem that much more plausible. The 16th century documents were very well done, very convincing. It became almost like a time travel story, with characters reaching across time, sort of like Connie Willis' The Doomsday Book. And like Willis, the modern day portion is, at times, a bit over the top. A reviewer on Amazon said Gruber is mixing the literary thriller genre with the potboiler, and we are to understand that is why things get so...exaggerated at times. If that's true (and it does fit), I have to say it was a little too much of an inside joke for this reader to enjoy. I'm not a metafictional kind of guy, I guess.The characters live and breathe on the page, so one has to look at how they acted, since they were so real. Let's start with Carolyn Rolly. Very hard to empathize with a woman who would abandon her children to a violent abuser. And why did she find it easier to turn to the Jewish Mafia (or the Russian Jewish...whatever) for help, than to, say, the police? So she's an immoral person, she makes bad choices, and at the end she gets rewarded. I don't think I like that. The other character that bothered me was one we spent a LOT of time with, Jake Mishkin. I would've liked this book a lot more if he had had a believable epiphany at the end. Instead, in a short, let's-get-this-book-over-with epilogue, he's suddenly kicked his sexual addiction (which the author has hammered into our heads for four hundred pages). Huh? Suddenly he "gets" what love is all about? I didn't buy it, so that was disappointing. Which brings up the question: who was this book about? Jake? Al? Richard Bracegirdle? Looking back now, I'm thinking this book may have been much better had the Jake point of view been removed completely, replaced by a third-person chapter here and there. His chapters don't advance the plot much, when you think about it. They compel you to keep reading, I suppose, to find out why he's sitting in a lakeside cottage waiting to be killed. The story really has little to do with this very unsympathetic guy, and yet we get hundreds of pages of his first-person thoughts. He's a yucky guy. Did we really need him? Maybe, if he'd performed some selfless act and earned redemption. Instead, what? He keeps his money. He gets his wife back (probably). I can't help thinking this could have made been made much better. Gruber says (on his website) that the plot came to him while meeting with an IP (intellectual property) lawyer. The plot, naturally, came to include said IP lawyer. Perhaps a step back would have revealed that the IP lawyer was really a minor character. Overall, an interesting read, but more for plot and not so much for the characters, who were unlikable (mostly), and didn't follow the rules for good, moral fiction. (see John Gardner)
    • 1/5
      Increasingly slow, the sections of olde English slowed it down even more. Boring and not worth the effort.
    • 3/5
      Modern day story of the discovery of what could be an unknown work by Shakespeare entwined around a story told in 17th Century manuscripts. Interesting plot with a few twists (fairly predictable I thought) and characters that were engaging and well developed but not always believable. I found this to be a well written and enjoyable thriller that was often hard to put down.
    • 3/5
      I had high hopes for The Book of Air and Shadows, but it only partially lives up to them. The premise is promising: a hidden letter, allegedly pointing out the location of a lost play by Shakespeare. Ciphered, of course – wouldn't be much fun otherwise, would it? Obviously riding the tsunami of historical conspiracy mysteries from the splash made by that book a few years back, but without being quite as bombastic and absurd.Sadly, the author does not quite pull it off: the novel is, to put it simply, way, to overburdened with unbelievable circumstance and convenient ex-machinas, mainly on the part of the characters and their background. I'll quickly walk you through it:One of the main characters is a Lawyer who, as it happens, used to be an Olympic weightlifter. Fair enough. His father is a Jewish gangster, his mother a semi-reformed "Nazi princess". His sister? Former supermodel. Brother? Murderous thug gone special forces, gone ghettolicious Jesuit priest with gang contacts. His (separated) wife? A Swiss financial genius richer than god. His son? An autistic hacker genius.And so on, and so on. Almost every character is like this: it's as if Gruber had some pathological compulsion to turn everyone in the book into a product of the most unlikely circumstances. Some characters works better than others, but overall it's... problematic: most of the cast are not really bad characters - a little flat and stereotypical maybe – but the sheer volume of their absurd uniqueness makes them absurd and cartoonish, and a colorful background is a poor substitute for characterization.The historical framing of the plot works better: and even if the puritan spy sent to destroy Shakespeare is just as overwrought as the rest of the cast his letters are at least enjoyable and somewhat believable in tone and language. The fact that we, unlike in most other "historical" mysteries, stay mainly well inside actual recorded history is a blessing and keeps the whole thing from becoming to ridiculous. The contemporary thriller aspects, however, doesn't work quite as well. Mood is established and a nice setting is brought in (I'm a sucker for book dealers) at a nice pace, but as soon as the shooting, punching and running starts it all goes out the window and becomes rather ludicrous. There's also a fair amount of "twists" that doesn't really cut it and causes the plot to rattle and shake considerably as it comes into the final stretch.This novel would have benefited greatly if it had decided in the beginning whether it wanted to be a semi-serious literary mystery, or a fun-ride larger-than-life romp with gangsters, spies and guns. As it is it tries to be both, and end up being neither. Read only if you really like bibliomysteries or historical thrillers, or if you're into fictional accounts of Shakespeare.
    • 3/5
      Jake Mishkin is an IP lawyer. Albert Crosseti works at a bookstore. They do not know eachother, but they will hunt for an unknown manuscript of Shakespeare. Or is it a fake?I found it very hard to get into this book, because of the changing perspective. And not only the varying perspective made it hard, the timeline in which the two maincharacters appear does not run equally. When you can get into this book it is a nice read, nothing special though. We have all seen it before in the Da Vinci code, the rule of four etc.
    • 3/5
      The good is the interesting observations Gruber makes throughout the book. Especially his take on how movies & authors have affected behavior. The historical/Shakespear was interesting. Um, the bad was he went on way, way too lng about the lead characters sex life and problems, and several kinda big plot holes (Carolyn leaving her kids when she could have just gone to the police, people taking the time to drink and have sex with russian mobsters after them, would the Shavonov kill Izzy the Books grandchildren??)
    • 4/5
      It's been a little while since I've read a thriller...this kind of falls into the historical/mystery/thriller genre. As I was reading I kept thinking that I could totally picture this on the big screen -- not sure if that's a good or bad thing. I had mixed feelings about this one. The plot seemed very alluring, yet I was a little disappointed. I would've liked to have seen more elaboration on the mystery side of things and less action w/ the good guys/bad guys, but that's just me. The main character, Jake Mishkin, was for the most part a very unlikeable chracter, and while I know he was supposed to be, it got a little too annoying after a while. I found myself a little confused in certain parts of the book & had to back up and re-read a paragraph or phrase to reorient myself at times. And there were aspects that seemed a little too unbelievable, but then again, I think you get that with any thriller-type novel. Overall, I really enjoyed the plotline of this book, but I can't quite put my finger on why it disappointed me somewhat.
    • 4/5
      I can't help but compare this with a couple other books I've read recently (bear with me), which are similar in that they have a mystery/thriller plot with elements of personal/self relationship interspersed. From one end of the spectrum to the other, we have Big Little Lies, Station Eleven, The Bone Clocks, and this Book of Air and Shadows. In BLL, the plot is almost beside the point, which is character and relationship. Station Eleven has an interesting but not intricate plot, and the relationships inform plot developments. In Bone Clocks, the best of the lot, plot is what makes the book, but relationships inform and drive the plot. In this book, the mystery and plot are easily the strongest element, and the relationships only marginally advance the plot. Sometimes they just distract.
    • 4/5
      Well-developed and fascinating main character, powerlifting IP lawyer whose father is a Jewish gangster and mother the child of a Nazi officer. Other interesting family members, too, well-characterized. Layered: the questions of trust and deceptions are woven throughout this thriller, are any of us what we seem? History: we get a first person account of life and religious politics during Shakespeare's day. And it's a page-turner. This is for anyone who likes smart mysteries. I will say that the frequent forays into letters purportedly written with 17th century spelling and usage were a little off-putting at first, but fortunately the story the letters tell makes it eventually worthwhile
    • 3/5
      Recommended by a reader as better than Geraldine Brooks 'People of the book'. However, I found the prose much less inspiring and the storyline quite confusing especially at the beginning. However, its main protagonist was an intellectual property lawyer so I am going to suggest it to my son who has nearly finished his law degree and is interested in this area of law.
    • 5/5
      An antique bookshop, a lost play by William Shakespeare, forgers, spies, secret codes, a treasure hunt, double-crossings, a femme-fatale, and a humdinger of a show-down between the bad guys and the not-quite good guys at the end? Sign me up! This was a very pleasant surprise for a book that I found for seventy-five cents at my local library's book sale.
    • 5/5
      A tale of deceit, fraud, love and infidelity as a motley crew of characters chase what may be undiscovered play of Shakespeare. The audiobook is well narrated. Stephen Hoye adds just a slight variation to each character to help you tell them apart.
    • 3/5
      Jake Mishkin is the son of a Jewish mafia accountant and a "Nazi princess." Needless to say, he and his siblings are all a little screwy. Mishkin is the antihero in this DaVinci Code-esque treasure hunt for a previously unpublished Shakespeare manuscript. Told in the first person by Mishkin, it also includes third-person narration by wannabe-filmmaker Albert Crosetti (the "patsy"--or not) and in epistolary form by Shakespeare contemporary Richard Bracegirdle. When Crosetti stumbles across a letter by Bracegirdle, the whole plot is thrown into motion. But the whole thing may be a ruse. Or maybe not--the ending was a bit confusing. Was it a plot set up by Mishkin's best friend, or not?This was a fine read, though not as un-put-down-able as DaVinci Code. Mishkin is not a lovable protagonist, but some of the minor characters--Crosetti's mom, Mary Peg, for one, are more lovable. I doubt I'll read it again, but don't regret the time spent.
    • 2/5
      I found this really boring
    • 3/5
      This is the first book I've read by Michael Gruber, and while the story telling wasn't bad I never really got into it. I didn't really like any of the characters, and everyone had several big blind spots which strongly affected their judgment, and made me grit my teeth. The book was good enough to get me to the end without pulling out my hair but if I wasn't listening to it on my commute I might not have finished it at all. It just wasn't very engaging. What kept my interest was the Bracegirdle letters that took place in the time of Shakespeare.We follow Jake Mishkin and Albert Crosetti through this book, though most is told through the past musings of Mishkin, except for the trips to the past where Bracegirdle told of his life in a letter to his wife and son. Overall not awful but I doubt I will purposely pick up another one of his books.
    • 3/5
      This book is not what I expected. The characters weren't as well developed as they could have been and I actually found the main character, Jake, extremely annoying. The plot was interesting and the mysterious manuscript kept me reading, but the characters really dampened the experience for me.
    • 4/5
      If anyone ever tells you that thrillers can’t be “literary” then point them at this novel. Gruber does an excellent job of developing his oddball characters while at the same time spinning out a tale full of twists and turns as the players attempt to decipher coded documents and track down a long-lost Shakespeare play. Most thrillers read like outlines for a good novel, with all the meaty parts left out. Not so Gruber’s book. It’s got plenty of meat to chew on.That’s not to say that I didn’t see the ending coming. In fact, the plot follows the well worn path of countless thrillers before it. We have the search for a Maguffin, the double and triple cross, the unsuspected villain, the clueless narrator, the chase scene, and so forth and so on. But it’s great fun and a wonderful read.
    • 2/5
      At the beginning of the book we find Jake Mishkin, an intellectual property lawyer, hiding on a remote cabin and waiting for a bunch of Russian gangsters to come and finish him off. As the story progresses, part of me begins to wish they would hurry the hell up already. At least that would save me from reading all of Mishkin's ramblings about the sorry state of his life. But more on that later.The story itself starts with a burning bookshop. While trying to salvage a set of books after the fire, Al Crosetti and his colleague/girlfriend candidate Carolyn Rolly find an old manuscript in the binding of the books. The manuscript is written by Richard Bracegirdle, a 17th century busybody, who has among other things gotten himself mixed up with the spying of one William Shakespeare. Bracegirdle goes on to suggest that there would still be an unpublished play by Shakespeare to be found, lying around somewhere on the British countryside. To make matters interesting, the hiding place of the play is revealed in a series of letters, all written in cypher. After Crosetti is swindled to sell the manuscript to a professor for peanuts, Rolly disappears and Crosetti is left alone to crack the code of the cypher with his clever mother and her band of friends. The professor is later murdered, right after leaving the manuscript in the possession of Jake Mishkin, which brings him along to the intrigue.Doesn't sound that bad right? Well it wouldn't be if the story didn't alternate between Crosetti and Mishkin with the letters of Bracegirdle, all written in Olde Englishe, thrown in for good measure. Now while Crosetti, who actually gets things done and the story going onward, is a likeable, sympathetic character, Mishkin is anything but. For some reason the author has deemed it necessary for the reader to know the whole of Mishkin's life's story, a little of which, in my opinion, has any relevance to the underlying story of the manuscript. Since all Mishkin seems to have is problems, especially when it comes to relationships with his mother, father, siblings, ex-wife, children, lovers and well, basically everybody, it really starts to get on your nerves after awhile.There were some parts of the book that I liked though. I thought the last 1/3 of the story was fairly exiting, if only because the pace was finally picking up and Mishkin had finally finished his recital. And I liked Crosetti. In fact I wish the book had been about him, which would have made the story half the length and twice as interesting.
    • 4/5
      I'm in the middle of reading and it has gotten more interesting but it seemed to start out slow. I had to push myself to stay with it in the beginning but I'm glad I did.
    • 2/5
      Also on my Goodreads review:The book dragged for the first 100 or so pages, and I started to care about the characters more, esp. Albert Crosetti and his family, Jake, hmm, not so much, he was the character you kinda love to hate, but hope he finds redemption for his lost soul. The plot and pace also picked up dramatically at this point and gets more exciting (think car chases in Europe, fancy jet planes, escaping out of hotel windows). The climax was kinda muddled and you couldn't tell if the whole thing was a big hoax or not, which detracted greatly from the enjoyment of the book. Also the long and lengthy Bracegirdle letters (written in old english style) did not add anything to the book but confusion and for me, only gave me a headache. It would have been better if the author added only small excerpts (maybe a paragraph at most) of the letters which would have led to less confusion and head pain. The style and descriptions remind me of why I do not like Tom Clancy, but others may find this type of book wonderful in it's lengthy details and descriptions, just not me. There were some enjoyable moments in this book, so while I did not hate it, there were too many times I had to struggle to get through the book.
    • 4/5
      A thriller moving between two narrators. There is the lawyer Mishkin and the wannabe young movie maker Crossetti. The characters are filled with their flaws and strengths. The story moves forward a little slow, but wraps up nicely in the end. As a thriller it kept my attention, but at times I wished the characters were a little more engaging. Crossetti's character was the much more attractive one with constant interplay of real life and movie scripts/plotting. Well worth a read.The side letters from Bracegirdle regarding Shakespeare were quite interesting, but not enough to make this actual historical fiction.
    • 1/5
      really did not like this,found the characters completely unlikable.didn't care if they lived or died
    • 2/5
      Written in too many points of view. Hard to follow story.
    • 2/5
      Could not finish this one, despite an interesting premise; characters not resonant with me and three parallel POVs/plots diminished any engagement I had with the book.
    • 2/5
      A good but not great read. Each of the main characters is developed so that you almost feel like you know someone like that...but then all this crazy stuff starts to happen to them and the overlapping storylines become a little much. You have to be willing to suspend reality for the sake of the story but a worthwhile endeavor in the end.
    • 3/5
      I am a sucker for literary thrillers, novels that mix books with suspense. Sometimes these novels pay off big, such as the Cliff Janeway series of mysteries written by John Dunning. Sometimes they don't, such as "Codex" by Lev Grossman."The Book of Air and Shadows" by Michael Gruber, while far from a total success, nevertheless comes closer to the former than the latter.What would be the greatest literary discovery you can imagine? How about an unknown William Shakespeare play in the author's own handwriting? In Gruber's novel, Albert Crosetti and Carolyn Rolly, two young employees of a New York rare books dealer, discover references to such a play in letters found in the binding of a damaged book. They take the letters to an expert, who buys them for a relatively small sum, then later turns up dead. Meanwhile, Carolyn has disappeared, and Russian gangsters have joined the search for the missing play.Another key character in the novel is Jake Mishkin, the son of a gangster, who works as an intellectual property attorney. The Shakespeare expert gave the letters to him just before his death, and the Russians now want him to hand them over. Instead he teams up with Crosetti to try to find the missing play.The plot gets rather convoluted, and it's easier to believe there might really be an unknown work by Shakespeare than some of the things that go on in this novel. Even so, "The Book of Air and Shadows' makes entertaining summer reading.
    • 2/5
      Weird book. Couldn't decide what it was meant to be - the Shakespeare conspiracy was really secondary to the lives of the main protaganists.
      OK but not what I'd expected!

    • 4/5
      The Book of Air and Shadows is compared in some reviews to The DaVinci Code, which is a bit unfair. A much better comparison is to Umberto Eco’s far more sophisticated and enjoyable Foucault’s Pendulum. In both cases the protagonists run themselves ragged trying to gain possession – and provenance – of an almost mythical McGuffin. Although Gruber is no Eco – but then, who is? – this is never the less a fine effort. Two (converging, of course) storylines follow our two main treasure-hunters: an intellectual property lawyer who’s also a sex addict, and a loser bookstore clerk who’s got more to him than initially meets the eye. Both encounter femme fatales, action sequences, and lots of heady intellectual puzzles to solve. The cast of supporting characters is fun, too, with Jewish gangsters, Polish ex-spies, beady-eyed librarians, and some nicely parodied academics.I enjoyed the first three-fourths of this book thoroughly, but it loses steam in its final quarter. You see exactly the point at which Gruber realizes he’s got to get this thing wound up, and suddenly what should be pages-long action sequences are dispensed with in two sentences of prosy recap, the dialogue goes all expository, characters smash merrily through the boundaries of their expected behaviors, and the generally almost-plausible tone of the book descends into the silly. I’d still recommend this one, though – keep your expectations in reasonable check, and you’ll have a good time with it.
    • 3/5
      While the premise is as fascinating as those of the author's other books -- his newest included -- the book itself is not as successful. The plot bogs down in the middle and has a hard time pulling itself up. The characters are not as intriguing as those of the Paz novels, nor is the action as compelling. I was disappointed; it didn't put me off reading his newest however, which I enjoyed.
    • 3/5
      I am currently reading this book, and I find myself getting bored and putting it down. Sometimes I'm really interested in the story, but sometimes the author just loses that spark that makes you want to keep reading. Especially when you hit the letters that are printed in between the other two plot lines in the book, those seem to be almost walls for me, I end up coming to one and stopping, and picking up the book later when I happen to want to try again. I don't know if I'll finish this.