From the author of NOCTURNES and FLIGHT FROM EIN SOF. Blending history, art and fiction, THE INVENTOR is an ode to secular humanism and a searing condemnation of religious and political sophistry. Multi-layered, this story-within-a-story revisits crimes committed in the name of God. It also resurrects a largely unknown, sadly neglected medieval painter who, reaching beyond the grave, can now show his face, belie his critics and put an end to speculations about the insights, passions and ordeals that inspired his art. Capturing the horrors his eyes have seen and foreshadowing the upheavals that would rock the world, filled with blistering commentaries on life, free thought, human bestiality and the death of reason, his allegories, now five centuries old, denounce the despotism of absurd beliefs and satirize the pointless circularity of the human condition. "Painting is another way of keeping a diary," Pablo Picasso once said. THE INVENTOR agitates against false prophets who, to ensnare men's souls, fill their heads with mind-boggling lies and often resort to violence to achieve their objectives. In so doing, it also offers another way of prying into a diary's most scandalous secrets.