SJ Parris gives us a glimpse into the younger years of Giordano Bruno, her 16th-century heretic and spy, in this collection of three beguiling novellas... In A Christmas Requiem, he is summoned to meet the Pope – and his memory tricks don’t go down as well as he might have hoped. “Naples is too small for you,” Bruno is told, but in order to leave “you must learn the arts of flattery and humility as well as plain-speaking, because if you can’t temper your views, and keep some of your thoughts to yourself, one day you will talk yourself into the arms of the Inquisition”.
