Turning the page to a subsection date-stamped ‘“1592’”, the reader expects to get the historical background to the Welles poems, and is not disappointed.Īs might be expected a book called The Mirror Thief, with one character called Glass and another who is a pioneer of looking-glass technology, the text is filled with reflections. The sections set in the 50s show the young Glass coming under the influence of Welles, whose cult book tells the story of Crivano, who became involved in a Venetian scandal over the making of mirrors. Glass claims to have derived this from The Mirror Thief, a poetry collection by Adrian Welles, a fictional Los Angeles Beat poet who became friendly with Ezra Pound when the fascist-sympathising writer was confined in an asylum. Curtis is searching for Stanley Glass, a super-gambler who has fleeced casinos using a system of probability calculation. In the most recent portions of the story, on the eve of the second Gulf war, a retired veteran of the first attack on Saddam Hussein is on some sort of civilian mission around the Vegas gaming tables. While the publishers have understandably cited the epoch-crossing novels of David Mitchell as a comparison point, the characters and narratives in the three time zones of The Mirror Thief are more formally linked than the sections of a Mitchell book such as Cloud Atlas. Starting 13 years ago in the Las Vegas of 2003, it then reverses to California in 1958 and Venice in 1592, subsequently alternating sections from these eras. T hough flashbacks are currently a fashionable novelistic tactic, this bold American debut makes unusual historical jumps.

The mirror thief