Palace of Tears
The Thieves of Time sequence · Book 2
Cambridge & Berlin, 1975 — The Festival Theatre & Prenzlauer Berg.
Cambridge, 1975. Steve Percival is a young poet with a repudiated manuscript, uncertain prospects and a talent for becoming entangled in other people’s lives.
When a complicated affair draws him into the orbit of Grace Mitchell—a brilliant, newly separated academic—his world expands into one of intellectual ambition, sexual politics and uneasy emotional bargains. Around them gather publishers, artists, actors, old lovers and new rivals, each carrying private motives and unfinished business.
As Steve’s life begins to move from university rooms to the stage, the atmosphere darkens. A journey to divided Berlin brings him into contact with surveillance, espionage and a society where intimacy itself can become a form of leverage. In Cambridge, meanwhile, his relationships continue to shift beneath him, shaped by desire, grief, jealousy and the need to belong.
Set against the cultural ferment of the 1970s, Palace of Tears is an understated, character-driven novel about love, artistic identity, betrayal and the stories people tell to survive. With its literary intelligence, dry humour and quietly unsettling sense of fate, it follows a young man trying to discover whether he can become the author of his own life.
But in a world of mirrors, who is really writing the script?