John Hopper's 100 books in 2026

My thread for my 2026 reading.

I read 101 books in 2025.

I have done a little analysis of the 101 books I read in 2025.

Of these 20 were non-fiction, and 81 fiction. This is probably a fairly normal proportion for me.

I gave 18 books 5 out of 5 marks. Of these 18, 4 were for works of non-fiction. These were:

Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar by Tom Holland

Sensitive: The Power of a Thoughtful Mind in an Overwhelming World by Jenn Granneman

The Last Days of Hitler by Hugh Trevor-Roper

A Short History of Ireland, 1500–2000 by John Gibney

Of these four, my favourite was the Tom Holland. The narrative history of Ancient Rome is always a genre of non-fiction I love.

The 14 works of fiction to which I gave 5/5 were an eclectic mix of literary fiction, historical fiction, science fiction, thrillers and children's/fairy stories:

March Violets by Philip Kerr

Acté by Alexandre Dumas

The Good Earth by Pearl S Buck

Doctor Who: The Shadow In The Glass by Justin Richards & Stephen Cole

Doctor Who: Illegal Alien by Mike Tucker

West of Sunset by Valerie Anand

Six Tudor Queens: Anna of Kleve, Queen of Secrets by Alison Weir

The Curse of the Hungerfords by Alison Weir

Night of Camp David by Fletcher Knebel

The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning

Finding Alfie: A D-Day Story by Michael Morpurgo

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng

The Fires of Autumn by Irene Nemirovsky

Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars by Terrance Dicks

My favourites of these were probably The Good Earth and The Gift of Rain.

I also gave nine further books 4.5/5.

>2 john257hopper: The Good Earth is also one of my favs. There are 2 more in that series, both of which I rated 4 stars.

1. The Taking of Chelsea 426 - David Llewellyn

This is a spin-off Doctor Who novel featuring the 10th Doctor as played by David Tennant. In a future earth colony orbiting Saturn, a version of the Chelsea flower show featuring alien flora is about to open. But the exhibition is a cover for an invasion by the Rutans who have been taking over colonists as part of their never-ending war with the Sontarans, who in turn invade the colony to hunt down their Rutan enemies. With the aid of two children Jake and Vienna, the Doctor manages to save the colony. The tone of this story is rather light and I didn’t think the 10th Doctor worked as well here in print as he did on TV. A decent story though.

Good luck with your reading this year John, that Sensitive book looks interesting, thanks.

Happy historical reading in 2026, John.

I'm always so pleased to see anyone loving The Good Earth. I've really enjoyed most of Buck's novels (that I've read so far).

2. Sherlock Holmes: The Four-Handed Game - Paul D Gilbert

This is the second in the author’s Odyssey of Sherlock Holmes trilogy, though I did not realise when I read The Unholy Trinity in 2018 that it had sequels. The plot was once again full of high stakes and dramatic incident, though mostly confined to London this time, as our sleuths try to solve various murders and their connection to the Bavarian Brotherhood. I think Holmes came across as more nuanced than in the first novel but overall, I would still say I prefer this author’s short pastiche stories to his novels.. That said, this ended on a cliffhanger, so I will read the third novel straight away.

I was irritated at the number of grammatical and lexical errors, such as use of “I” as an object pronoun and confusion between use of adverse/averse. Some of the footnotes were wrongly linked too.

3. The Illumination of Sherlock Holmes - Paul D Gilbert

This is the third in the author’s Odyssey of Sherlock Holmes trilogy, which follows on directly from the action of book 2 (though the insertions of recaps slightly confused this for me for a while). As before, the plot toddled along well and was full of dramatic incident, though the final plans of the Bavarian Brotherhood struck me as overly messianic and too technologically knowing for the late 19th century. The main villain was Baron Gruner, the Austrian murderer, a character from the Conan Doyle short story “The Illustrious Client”. I liked the involvement in the narrative of an unnamed author of speculative fiction which is obviously meant to be H G Wells, though the ideas alluded to sounded like his novel The War in the Air, which was not published until 1908. Overall I like the author’s characterisation of Holmes and Watson here. But, and it is quite big but, once again, there are so many errors in grammar and word choice and I just don’t understand why this is the case in a generally well written novel. The constant use of “I” instead of “me” when referring to the object of a sentence; the wrong use of “principle/principal” and “meretricious/meritorious”; footnote references to the wrong Conan Doyle story, among other examples, really grated on me. Why?? For me I’m afraid this has to be docked a point over and above my view of its basic worth and get no higher than 3/5.

I also read the original Sherlock Holmes story featuring Baron Gruner:

4. The Adventure of the The Illustrious Client - Arthur Conan Doyle

This is one of the later Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes short stories and features as the villain Baron Gruner, the Austrian murderer, who bumped off his first wife and now has in his sights a young daughter of a British aristocrat whom he has managed to seduce and place within his power. Holmes and Watson outwit Gruner of course and the ending is quite shocking and horrific, as a spurned ex-lover of his takes her revenge on him. This is not one of the more memorable of the Sherlock Holmes short stories.

>8 john257hopper: You lose trust in writers who make that sort of error. During the pandemic I read hundreds of historical romances and came across some truly terrible writing. I put up with it for the sake of a happy ending. Back to vintage crime now, with writers who use "whom". Where did it go?

>8 john257hopper: I understand that what you’re describing is typically the job of an editor. That said, if my name were on it, I’d consider myself an editor too. When I read nonfiction and come across those kinds of errors, I’m afraid I end up discounting the entire book.

>9 pamelad: and 10 Yes it is not forgivable in either an author or editor in my view.

5. Joan of Arc: A History - Helen Castor

I have been reading this well written and very well researched book alongside a series of episodes on this theme from my favourite history podcast. The book covers the life and influence of one of the most famous women in history in a slightly different way to a conventional biography. Instead of viewing Joan’s history from the time of her death and looking backwards, Castor recounts the narrative as it unfolded in real time in France, without the benefit of hindsight, from a decade and a half before Joan’s appearance on the scene in early 1429 with Henry V of England’s victory at Agincourt in 1415. This was a hammer blow for French fortunes and led to a long decline in French morale, exacerbated by the civil war between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, who were allied with England in their battle to win the French crown, a goal that seemed to have finally been achieved by the dual monarchy agreed at the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, under which Henry V of England would acquire the French throne on the death of Charles VI of France.

Against this turbulent backdrop, Joan’s appearance and her amazing claims to be able to raise the siege of Orléans, crown the dauphin as King Charles VII, and drive the English from France, were revolutionary. But she succeeded in all these aims, albeit that the final one was not completed until nearly twenty years after her death when the English were finally driven out of all French territory, with the exception of Calais. After many military successes, Joan was eventually captured by the Burgundians and handed over to the English. Despite her military and political opposition, the thrust of the articles laid against at her trial in 1431 were religious in nature, though the damage her actions and words were held to have caused the Catholic church often seemed to take second place to the scandal caused by her dressing in men’s clothes. The book also covers the second trial of 1456, the nullification trial which quashed the verdict of the first trial in the greatly changed political situation of a quarter of a century later when the English had been driven out, the Hundred Years War over, and England now riven by the dynastic conflict later known as the Wars of the Roses. A fascinating approach to a truly revolutionary and fascinating personality.

6. Saint Joan - George Bernard Shaw

This play is a powerful dramatic presentation of the public life and death of Joan of Arc. It defies easy genre categorisation, for example Scene I contains slapstick comedy between Sir Robert Baudricourt, his page, and Joan, while Scene IV contains lengthy and earnest discussion between those who will shortly lead Joan’s prosecution on the theological arguments for Joan’s heresy and necessary condemnation to death by burning, which they present in all seriousness and without, at least in their eyes if not in ours, any cruelty or insincerity. Of necessity, the six scenes plus epilogue telescope events into 7 days, including the whole of Joan’s lengthy examination, trial, near execution, recantation, relapse, and final burning into one single day. I am not sure the epilogue really worked for me, and a shorter and more punchy way of covering the nullification trial of 1456 night have been more effective. Some 40% of the overall length of the book is taken by the author’s lengthy preface where he ruminates on Joan’s significance and attitudes towards from a modern (1920s) point of view and I only skimmed this. This play is a powerful piece of drama and I would love to see it performed.

>13 john257hopper: I saw this performed in 1986 at the Huntington Theater in Boston, MA! I remember being absolutely entranced by the first parts and having to sit through it without an intermission didn't seem like a problem-- until the epilogue. That was absolutely brutal. The saving grace though was the backdrop which slowly came to life with fleur-de-lis, each with a fiber optic point of light in the middle that slowly faded into a starry sky. It was absolutely breathtaking.

Funnily enough, a few weeks ago, I was clearing out a storage locker and came across a box full of hundreds of theater programs. I went through the box-- many had not survived well and need to be tossed; others were of plays I really couldn't remember (also a toss); but there were a few that were worth saving and that I remembered well, e.g., Saint Joan! :-)

7. Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell

This is Orwell’s famous description of his experiences living hand to mouth for a time as a young man in the late 1920s, providing evocative descriptions of poverty in both cities. This was the first book published under his Orwell pseudonym, in 1930. He was not actually “down and out” as such in Paris, as he lived in rented accommodation while unemployed, then working first in a hotel and then in a newly opened restaurant, as a dishwasher. He describes the punishingly long hours he works at this task (17 and a half hours a day at one point, from 7am to 12.30 am the following day, plus a commute each way to his lodging). But even this is better than the hunger he had experienced beforehand and which he vividly describes that it “reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though one had been turned into a jellyfish, or as though all one’s blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted. Complete inertia is my chief memory of hunger; that, and being obliged to spit very frequently, and the spittle being curiously white and flocculent, like cuckoo-spit. I do not know the reason for this but everyone who has gone hungry several days has noticed it.”

Owing to a friend’s generosity in paying his passage back to England, he lands up back in London, but a promised job is delayed and he once again falls on hard times. Here he tramps from “spike” to “spike” (temporary accommodation attached to workhouses), to stay for the permitted one night only in each place, often in the company of an Irish tramp predictably called Paddy. As well as the poverty, the monotony comes across too - the malnutrition caused by the constant diet of just tea, bread and margarine, staying in bleak and often cold and noisy cells or dormitories, with unhealthy, dirty and wretched men (there are very few female tramps). For Orwell, of course, unlike most of the others, this period of time has a finite length and at the end of the book he reflects on the nature, causes of, and prejudices against vagrancy and how they might be addressed.

8. The Silence of the Girls - Pat Barker

This is the first in the author’s trilogy retelling the events of the Greeks and Trojans in Homer’s epics The Iliad and The Odyssey from the point of view of the women involved and in particular of Briseis, wife of the king of a minor Trojan city, Lyrnessus. The story begins with the sack of her city by the Greeks and the massacre of all the men, including her husband and four brothers (all old men and non-fighting boys are also all hunted down and killed). Briseis and other females are carried off to the Greek camp, where she becomes the “prize” of Achilles, (in)famous leader of the Myrmidons.

The story conveys in stark simplicity the horrors of the war, the sexual violence, and the complete lack of agency on the part of the female captives who are now concubines and slaves to their new individual Greek masters. But over time, Briseis has perforce to learn to adapt despite herself to her new situation, and try to bring about a new accommodation with Achilles. In the same way, others among the captive women adapt to their new situations and even come to love their captor “husbands”.

Despite the brutal realism of this world, it is one where the liminal still exists: Achilles goes for morning swims to meet his mother the sea nymph Thetis; Priam miraculously enters the Greek camp without protection to plead for the return of his son Hector’s body; the spirit of the slain Patroclus, Achilles’s companion and lover, returns to guide, comfort and try to restrain his actions. Patroclus is probably the most admirable man in in this story - he was one man that Briseis herself also misses, due to the moderating effects of his influence on Achilles, who frequently acts like a man-child, especially during his spat with Agamemnon.

One disadvantage of historical novels told from a female point of view is that battles and sieges generally cannot be shown in first person narration. So here the fall of Troy, the death of Achilles and the capture of the Trojan women all take place in a few short paragraphs in hindsight. And no mention of a wooden horse! (This said, the first person narration is not consistently applied elsewhere in the narrative).

At the end of the story, then, after Troy has been conquered, the Greeks prepare to return home, under the leadership of Agamemnon. Briseis reflects, perhaps a little too knowingly, about how all these events will be viewed by future generations: “What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times? One thing I do know: they won’t want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won’t want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won’t want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they’ll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps? I just hope they manage to work out who the lovers were.
His story. His, not mine. It ends at his grave”.

A great read and I will look forward to reading the rest of the trilogy before too long.

>16 john257hopper: Sounds delightful! I've read the Iliad and The Song of Achilles and recognize some of the names. Off to find this book!

9. Closing Time - Jason Ayres

So this is the fifteenth and final book in the Time Bubble series. It has an appropriate doom-laden atmosphere (albeit with some lighter touches at the end which could allow for further stories). It is the 2060s and our heroes are getting older in their own individual timelines, with a couple of them passing away, and one suffering from dementia, which I thought was well covered here. But a greater threat looms over not just the whole of our world and universe but indeed the whole multiverse. An anomaly creeps over the surface of the Earth from the mid-Pacific Ocean over the globe, obliterating everything in its path, but leaving the remaining population with no memory of the obliterated portions (which leads to some bizarre and blackly comedic consequences). Josh and Henry and the rest of the gang try various attempts to change past events to avert this catastrophe. I won’t give away spoilers but the resolution is enigmatic and gave rise to mixed emotions in me. This has been a wonderful series that I have loved over the last six years. I am pleased the author has another time travel series to pursue set in the 1980s.

10. On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain - Gildas

This work is one of the very few primary sources written by a near contemporary we have for British history in the 6th century AD, the real “Dark Ages” between the end of Roman rule and the proper establishment of the first Anglo Saxon kingdoms (called the sub-Roman period). That said, it is not a very good source for the modern reader, as it was not intended to be an objective chronicle, Gildas’s purpose in writing it being “to preach to his contemporaries in the manner of an Old Testament prophet, not to write an historical account for posterity”. Indeed I would say only around 10-15% of the work could be classed as history (valuable though even this is with so little known about this time), and much of the rest is religious polemic designed to bolster his view that British society has undergone decay and deterioration due to its supposed abandonment of the Christian faith. When he does mention a few names of (otherwise unknown) kings in this period, it is to rubbish them. About the only character he speaks favourably of is Ambrosius Aurelianus and, while he mentions the Battle of Mons Badonicus, he does not mention King Arthur, to whom later texts attribute the victory in this battle.

The Delphi edition of the history is supplemented by two later Medieval biographies of the author, one written some three hundred years later in c 800 by a monk in the abbey of Ruys, that Gildas established, and a much short one written over three centuries later in c 1150 by a Welshman Caradoc of Llancarfan. The details of Gildas’s family are completely different in each of these (e.g. he has four brothers in the first biography, and no fewer than 23 in the second one, and their father has a completely different name). The first biography contains colourful incidents describing the various miracles Gildas is supposed to have performed, including saving the people of Rome from a dragon whose noxious breath was spreading plague by ordering it to lie down and die, as well as the more traditional making the lame walk and blind see again type miracles. The second biography mentions King Arthur, though the author does not think much of him.

All in all, this is an interesting historical curiosity due to the rarity of source material from this time, despite its faults for the modern reader.

11. The Outward Urge - John Wyndham

This is the first John Wyndham novel I have read in over 12 years, and is not one of his better known ones. The action takes place over a period of 200 years from 1994 onwards (35 years into the future when the book was published). It concerns the race to build a space station on the Moon and move ever outwards into space, to Mars, then Venus, then the Asteroid Belt, and thence, who knows. Successive generations of one family, the Troons/Trunhos, drive this forward over 200 years from 1994-2194, pursuing and seeking to satisfy their desire to spread ever further away and explore the unknown.

The geopolitics is interesting. There is a mysterious (to the observers on the moon) Great Northern War in 2044 where the US, Europe and Russia are all wiped out, but it isn't clear who started it and what the circumstances are. The geopolitical centre of Earth moves southwards to Brazil and Australia, and outer space becomes a "province of Brazil". Members of the Troon family suffer fatal misfortunes, including being blown up trying to stop a missile, dying on the surface of Mars, and as a victim of conflicts between the new superpowers following the first expedition to Venus.

Incidentally, Venus as depicted here is the pre-1960s version with watery oceans and rain, plant and insect life, before in our world the early probes discovered it had a surface temperature of nearly 500 degrees C and an air pressure 90 times that of Earth. In line with a lot of science fiction, the story says more about the Earth of the time it was written (1950s) rather than the future times it portrays, with no women in prominent positions (there is only one, minor, female character in the story), everyone smoking, and computers still using punch cards to process data. Overall though quite an enjoyable read but nowhere near as impactful as Wyndham's more famous works.

12. Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World - Laura Spinney

This is a very readable account of this pandemic that swept the world in the closing months and immediate aftermath of the First World War, probably killing between 50-100 million people, far more than died during that war overall across the world (though in Europe itself more people were killed in the war than through the pandemic). This represented some 2.5%+ of the world's population, though there is a good degree of uncertainty due to poor data from Russia and China. In India alone, 18 million people died
Its name arose due to an injustice of the disease receiving more coverage in the newspapers in neutral Spain than in other countries where the press was subject to wartime censorship. In fact, there are three main theories of its place of origin:

- Kansas, USA, from someone in a military camp from where soldiers sent to Europe to fight in the trenches;
- the Western Front in France; or
- China, from one of hundreds of thousands of labourers exported across the Pacific to the US and from there in many cases sent to Europe

This book was written before COVID, but it is interesting to compare experiences of the two pandemics. Whereas in COVID, the first wave was the worst, the Spanish flu came in three waves, a mild one in Spring 1918, a very severe one in the late summer and autumn of 1918 (often combined with pneumonia), and a less serious wave in early 1919. Although there have been great concerns about the lack of preparedness for COVID in many countries, it is salutary to recall that there were very few treatments available at all in 1918 - there were no antibiotics and no anti-virals. It was not even known that this pandemic was caused by a virus (the first flu vaccine was not produced until 1936). Doctors tended to throw in everything they had by way of treatments, and over-prescription of aspirin may have led to some of the deaths in countries where it was readily available, and mercury was even used, as it seemed to prevent those being treated with it for syphilis from contracting flu. That said, some antibacterial vaccines had some effect in the terrible second wave as they combatted the secondary pneumonia many victims caught. Some of the descriptions of this second wave pneumonia sound like pneumonic plague and it was confused for that in some places.

The dislocation was immense, given that the pandemic took place during the closing months of what was then the biggest war in history, with vast numbers of people on the move, willingly or unwillingly, to spread it, and populations in many countries were weakened by malnutrition or other diseases such as TB. In addition, the mortality was particularly prevalent in ages 20-40, meaning many families lost breadwinners, causing greater suffering in surviving younger and older dependants. Finally, germ theory was still poorly understood, or simply not accepted, in a lot of places outside Europe and North America, among the mass of the population. In many places, similar debates went on they as did during COVID about the balance between state sanctions and individual and local freedoms.

The final chapters of the book look at the aftermath and longer term consequences of the Spanish flu, the effect on public health debates and development of more centralised state-run health provision in many countries, and also the effect on literature and the arts in the 1920s, though here I think it is harder to distinguish between effects produced by the pandemic and those produced by the Great War. Overall though the changes wrought by Spanish flu were profound and should be better known today.

13. Cross Stitch - Amanda James

This light-hearted time travel romance story is a sequel to the author's A Stitch in Time that I read back in 2020. The romance elements are more than I would normally be entirely comfortable with as a perhaps slightly jaded middle-aged man (!), but I do love a time travel story. I found the central character Sarah's constant impulsiveness and headstrong attitude increasingly irritating, though her husband John's over-protective attitude was also annoying, albeit more understandable after Sarah becomes pregnant with their twins. My favourite character was Veronica, though I also like John's dad Harry, who came across to me as probably the most rounded and believable character in the novel.

The time travel adventures were all within the mid to late 20th century this time and included: late 1939, just after the war starts; the punk era in 1979; 1955 Alabama the day of Rosa Parks's famous act of resistance that led to the bus boycott that started the civil rights movement; a devastating tornado in Kansas in 1955; the Southampton blitz of 1941; and back to 1966 for a brief interlude just before the World Cup final where John replaces Geoff Hurst's bootlaces with new ones! Overall, I thought the novel was probably somewhat too long and I was well ready for it to end, though overall still quite enjoyable.

14. Carthage: A New History of an Ancient Empire - Eve MacDonald

This is a well written historical narrative of the ancient state of Carthage in north Africa, most famous for its utter destruction in 146 BC at the hands of the Romans. But there was a lot more to Carthage than that tragic end. Although it is the case that we are dependent almost entirely on sources from the victorious Roman side, this book contends that it is possible to look more deeply and gain some understanding of the Carthaginians' perspective, to balance the standard Roman trope that they were deceitful, cowardly and greedy and basically deserved to be conquered and destroyed.

Carthage is actually slightly older than Rome by a few decades, being founded in 814 BC by Phoenician colonists from the city of Tyre in what is currently Lebanon. We know little about its early centuries as it must have been growing in power at around the same time as Rome itself was forming its identity under its semi-mythical seven kings. Ironically they both became republics around the same time, in the late 6th century BC, though we don't know the individual names of any of the early Carthaginians, until a certain Malchus around that time.

By the 5th century BC Carthage had become a prominent power in the western Mediterranean, based on its proximity to the sea and its seafaring prowess, exemplified by an early Carthaginian called Hanno the Navigator who sailed around a large part of the African coastline beyond the Mediterranean and down the Atlantic seaboard. Its successful maritime trade with other powers led to alliances with the Etruscan states in northern Italy and even with the then smaller nascent Roman republic. Carthage expanded and vied with the Greeks for control of parts of Sicily, and with the tyrant Agathocles of Syracusa. Before too long, Carthage and Rome were left as the last two standing major powers in the central Mediterranean which, especially given the insatiable Roman desire for expansion, was bound to lead to conflict between the two.

The wars usually known as the three Punic Wars (though presumably Carthage would have called them the Roman Wars) dominated the last 120 or so years of Carthage's existence. The First Punic War lasted over 20 years, from 264-241 BC and, while the advantage swung one way then another, Rome generally had the edge. After Carthage was defeated, it faced an internal war from rebellious unpaid soldiers, a conflict ironically put down with Roman help, albeit for opportunistic reasons, as they were able to seize Sardinia, which almost became a casus belli for renewed warfare.

It is the Second Punic War fought in the last couple of decades of the third century BC which is probably the most famous one, being the one with the Hannibal leading his elephants across the Alps. Iberia was now the frontier with the expanding Roman Empire and conflict there between the states drove Hannibal to make his celebrated march across Europe and down into Italy, where he won his famous crushing victory at Cannae, a humiliating defeat for the Romans that haunted them for centuries. This was the apotheosis of Carthage's power and how radically different European history might have been if Hannibal had followed up his victory by marching on Rome. But it seems he didn't quite have the capability, resources, or perhaps the vision to do so. The Romans fought back hard and neutralised Hannibal in Italy, and also killed his younger brother Hasdrubal who had followed him across the Alps to come to his aid. The Romans also became dominant in Iberia. Eventually Carthage had to surrender and harsh terms were imposed under a treaty whereby they had to pay the Romans war reparations for 50 years and could not engage in any military conflict even on their own patch without Roman permission. Within his own city, Hannibal was blamed for the defeat, rival factions undermined him, and he committed suicide in 182 BC.

However, Carthage was economically resilient, and Rome resented this, especially when Carthage was doing so well that they offered to pay the entire war indemnity to Rome 40 years early, which was refused. Rome basically spent this period trying to provoke Carthage into another war by always siding with the Numidians in their territorial disputes with Carthage, which under the terms of the treaty Rome had to arbitrate. This ploy eventually succeeded and Rome invaded north Africa and besieged Carthage. Carthage was given a horrifying ultimatum, that the entire population must move out of the city, which would be destroyed, and had to live at least 15 km from the sea, which would be fatal for a maritime power. Having no choice, despite the vast strategic and numerical superiority of Rome and its allies, the Carthaginians resisted stoutly, to a man, woman and child, but they eventually succumbed in Spring 146 BCE and the city was totally destroyed, most of its people killed including its leaders, with a few thousand survivors being led into captivity from the temple where they had made their last stand.

This final fall always strikes me as one of the most shocking political demises of an entire state and its culture; although in the same year the Romans inflicted a similar cataclysm on Corinth, that did not of course have the same impact on Greek culture as the fall of Carthage did on Carthaginian culture. That said, the latter culture did survive in other Carthaginian cities in north Africa such as Utica, which had sided with the Romans in the final struggle. We do not know what the surviving dispersed Carthaginians felt but it must have been a devastating dislocation, not least as they had no real means of having their story and their culture transmitted further, except from a warped Roman perspective and through literary representations of their mythical founder Queen Dido. Rome built a new Carthage on the same site and the area became the Roman province of Africa. In the author's words, "the complexity of this once-great, sophisticated and multicultural African city with a history of innovative technologies, brave warriors and deep religious beliefs was gone", but at least with this book, we can gain some idea of what they were like and how they saw their own world.

15. Dido, Queen of Carthage - Christopher Marlowe

This is the Elizabethan playwright's adaptation of part of Virgil's epic The Aeneid, describing Trojan hero Aeneas's arrival on the shores of Dido's Carthage on his way to found Rome, and her all-consuming infatuation with him that leads to her own suicide and that of others.

The context of the source text is important. At the time when Virgil wrote The Aeneid under Emperor Augustus, Rome was in its first flush of true Empire and previously crushed enemies like the Carthaginians were bound to be depicted in a negative light. So here Dido, with her blind infatuation and drive to keep Aeneas by her side and away from founding Rome is seen as the epitome of the supposed Carthaginian weakness and cowardice, as well as being a negative stereotype of a woman.

This is a great little play. Fairly short, it really only has the one central theme and is in my view, stronger for that. The other two main pairs of characters that form a counterpoint to Dido and Aeneas are Dido's sister Anna, and her spurned lover Iarbas, whom Anna comes to love, while he is still in love with Dido. The language is eloquent and the scenes fly by quickly, and this is a pleasure to read.

16. The Stolen Lake - Joan Aiken

This the fourth in the author's series starting with the Wolves of Willoughby Chase set in a parallel world in the 1830s. This follows our young hero Dido Twite from books 2 and 3. She is an appealing character, humorous and unpretentious. In this one the ship she is on supposedly going back from America to Britain is diverted to Roman America (what we would call South America). She has various adventures in countries there called New Cumbria, Hy Brasil and Lyonesse (the latter two being names of mythical lands once believed to have existed in our world). There was more world building in this novel than in the previous ones, with a lot of Arthurian and some Inca references, while the overall effect reminded me somewhat of Lyra's world in Philip Pullman's novels. Following numerous search and flight sequences in the volcanic mountains, barren plains and silver mines of New Cumbria, Dido and her companions rescue a princess, find a lost king and defeat the evil Queen Ginevra. Good fun, and very imaginative.

Making a note of Pale Rider and the Eve Macdonald Carthage book. Great reviews!

I have read three further entries in Alison Weir's Six Tudor Queens series of novels and novellas:

17. The Wicked Wife

This e-short is linked to the fifth book in the author's Six Tudor Queens series. It is effectively a fictional potted biography of Jane Parker, Lady Rochford, who was the wife of the notorious and ill-fated George Boleyn, and was later companion and confidante of Queen Katheryn Howard, whose fate she shared after the Queen's affair with Thomas Culpepper. Covering over 20 years in just over double that number of pages, it felt rather rushed and Weir might have done better just to focus on one aspect of Jane's life. That said, she conveyed well the fear and terror Jane would have felt as the net closed in on the Queen and the guilt she felt at being the instrument of her husband George's death.

18. Six Tudor Queens: Katheryn Howard, The Tainted Queen

This is the fifth in the author's six novel series tracing the lives of Henry VIII's six wives. Historically, there tend to have been two views of Katheryn Howard, partly driven by the uncertainty over her year of birth and hence her age at the time of her marriage to the King in 1540 and her execution in early 1542. Traditionally many have viewed her as a teenage temptress, or a young woman of easy virtue, contrasting her undoubtedly real adultery with the false allegations of adultery made against her predecessor but two, Anne Boleyn. Others have viewed her as an innocent tool of powerful (mostly) men such as her uncle and her lovers, and of some women such as her step-grandmother the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk and possibly of her companion Jane Rochford, and even as a victim of child abuse inflicted by her lovers, including the King.

Having read this as usual wonderfully written and absorbing novel, I think neither of these descriptions really fit her case. Of course, her fall and death were tragic and horrible, yet she was willing to become the political pawn of her uncle and step grandmother in their bid to oust the reformers, as she really wanted to be queen. She was naive and reckless about her relationships particularly with the slippery Francis Dereham before her marriage to the King, though, of course, she was very young, and doubtless her growing up was affected by the early death of her beloved mother (in the very first few pages of the novel) and the spendthrift nature of her affectionate but hapless father. She was even more reckless in carrying on an affair with Thomas Culpeper after her marriage to the King, which grew in intensity particularly after she was becoming increasingly anxious at her failure to give the King the second son he craved. The novel conveys well the breathless tension of Katheryn's dodging around meeting Culpeper, and her increasing fear and terror after her sudden arrest, initially just for the premarital relations with Dereham but then later for the adultery with Culpeper (though she tried to argue it was not really adultery as they did not have full penetrative sex). Ultimately I think it has to be said she was largely the author of her own demise, while also obviously being manipulated by others. I think if just the Dereham stuff had come out and the Culpeper affair had either not happened at all or not been revealed, she would have saved her life at least, though she would probably have been divorced and disgraced given the King's (itself rather naive) belief in Katheryn's purity and innocence. In many ways Katheryn's is a really tragic story that contains a wide range of timeless human emotions about sexual love, jealousy and power.

19. The Princess of Scotland

This is the second e-short linked to the fifth book in the author's Six Tudor Queens series. Like the first, it is effectively a fictional potted biography, this time of Lady Margaret Douglas, King Henry's niece via his elder sister Margaret's second marriage to Lord Archibald Douglas (after the death of her first husband the Scottish King James IV, slain along with the cream of Scotland at the Battle of Flodden). Margaret Douglas is most famous for her affair with Thomas Howard, a much younger brother of the then Duke of Norfolk, which cost them their freedom and a spell in the Tower of London. This was because Margaret was at that time the heir presumptive to the English throne (both of Henry's daughters Mary and Elizabeth having been declared illegitimate by Act of Parliament), which meant that her affair was seen as potentially compromising the line of succession. This imprisonment cost Thomas his life, though Margaret was released after Queen Jane Seymour gave birth to Prince Edward, which meant Margaret was no longer the heir presumptive. Later, Margaret blotted her royal Tudor copybook again by getting involved with another Howard, this time Charles, one of the ill-fated Queen Katheryn Howard's brothers. Once again though, her uncle the King forgave her after Katheryn's fall. Margaret Douglas is an interesting character, the subject of one of the author's non-fiction biographies, which I must read.

I am not certain though that this format of the potted biography really works for these e-shorts, as it does not allow for a focus on dramatic incident, except for the few pages when she and Thomas are both prisoners in the Tower.

20. Kindred - Octavia Butler

This is a really powerful novel about race and the potential self-destructiveness of some interdependent human relationships. It is also a time travel novel, a genre of which I am always a fan.

Dana is a young black woman in California married to Kevin, a somewhat older white man (though, as if testing our assumptions, her husband's race is not mentioned nearly a fifth of the way through the novel). Dana is transported, initially on her own, back in time from the present day of 1976 (the novel was published in 1979) to a plantation in Maryland in 1815 (though she does not realise she has travelled in time until her second, and longer visit). Her time slips are connected to the activities of a red-haired boy and later young man, whom she realises on her second trip is her ancestor Rufus Weylin, who had children with a black woman Alice Greenwood. It becomes apparent that the timings of Dana's appearances in the past are linked to threats to Rufus's life (drowning, dying in a house fire, falling from a tree, etc. as per the chapter titles), while her returns to the present are caused when her own life is threatened, either by Rufus himself or by his callous and casually brutal father Tom. In this way, Dana and Rufus are locked in a perpetual hate - (almost of a sort) love relationship across time, each dependent on the other, Rufus needing Dana to save his life, while Dana needs Rufus to live to grow up and give birth to her ancestral line.

This is of course not an original science fiction idea at all, but is handled extremely well here, and enables the reader to see how a modern black woman copes with both the brutalities and banalities of slave life in the early 19th century, still some 50 years before the Civil War: the casual and severe whippings; the backbreaking and often monotonous work; the ever present threat of families being broken up; the prevention of slaves becoming literate so they cannot even imagine or bring about a alternative life. What perhaps strikes the modern reader as incongruous is the casual and matter of fact way in which the white owners act towards their slaves, sometimes not necessarily physically cruel per se, treating "their" slaves at one and the same time as possessions, work horses, wayward children or as being by instinct lazy and deceitful. The owners are of course, in their own terms, not behaving cruelly or unreasonably, in the same way that members in oppressor groups can very often behave perfectly reasonably and in a civilised manner towards other members of their group.

When Kevin is accidentally transported back with Dana, the dynamic changes, and he is able to protect her to some extent, though by the painful device of pretending they are master and slave, and not man and wife (which won't be believed). However, he is stranded in the past and separated from Dana for some five years, and to some extent becomes accustomed to life in that time as a white man largely living in the free North. They are able to reconcile themselves to each other, though with difficulty, as Dana's relationship (for want of a better word to describe this bizarre situation) with Rufus becomes more tortured. Dana and Kevin are eventually returned definitively to the present day (no spoilers about the denouement plays out).

This is a very powerful and grippingly written novel and I will read more by this author.

Pursuing the theme of the Reading Through Time Group's March theme, I have read two more narratives from ex-slaves:

21. Some Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman - Sarah Hopkins Bradford

This is a short biography of the life of this black American former slave and active fighter against the institution, compiled shortly after the Civil War. Tubman was born a slave in Maryland around 1820. She escaped in 1849 (just before the Fugitive Slave Act was passed) and spent the next part of her life bravely going back to her home state to rescue many other slaves, including her aged parents and most of her many siblings. Later in life she worked as an armed scout and spy for the North in the Civil War and even took part in military operations involving mass rescues of slaves. After that, he campaigned for women's suffrage.

Much of this book consists of testimonials from others as to Tubman's moral and physical courage, which are undoubtedly huge. Another feature was her profound and vocal religiosity, which she saw as the wellspring of her moral courage, and her religious visions, which may have been partly caused by brain damage due to a terrible incident during her slave life when she was hit on the head by a heavy metal object (accidentally, though only in the sense that the object had been deliberately aimed at another slave trying to escape).

This is a remarkable testimonial to a great black American woman. Apparently she lived to the age of around 90, dying in 1913.

22. Maryland Narratives - Various

This is a set of reminiscences collated in the late 1930s under the aegis of a project sponsored by the US Library of Congress to create a folk history of slavery in the US from interviews with former slaves. Volumes were produced for 17 states in which slavery was practiced, and published in 1941. This Maryland collection is volume 8.

The ex slaves whose voices we hear are all at least in their mid to late 80s (and one claims to be 116 at the time of interview), and no doubt in some cases their memories of events dating back to the 1850s and 60s have been affected by the passage of time and their individual experiences during the many decades of their free life. There are of course many common features, probably the most universal one being that slaves were almost never (except if employed as a teacher of the owner's children, for example) taught to read or write. They could not move around freely of course without the owner's permission. Not all owners were individually cruel on a day to day personal basis and not all whipped their slaves, or at least not within the experience of these witnesses. There are interesting and haunting accounts of the commonality of experiences such as simple slave marriage and burial ceremonies.

All I would say by way of (small) criticism would be that this collection could have contained a bit more background context for the interviews. But maybe I am missing the point, which was to give the ex-slaves' unfiltered views, or at least filtered only by the passage of time and experience in their lives.

23. Verona in Autumn: What next for Romeo and Juliet? - Tom Lloyd

This beautifully written novel is, as the sub-title suggests, a sequel to Shakespeare's play, one of the most famous love stories in Western literature. Apart from a short prologue, it is set 20 years later though, so not what was immediately next after the play's tragic conclusion. Here Juliet wakes up from the sleep-inducing drug she has taken just before Romeo tries to kill himself in despair. They escape to Milan, marry and have two children, Mercutio and Estelle.

Twenty years later they return to Verona incognito as advisors in the entourage of Francesco, Verona's governor on behalf of the ruling Viscontis of Milan. Juliet is eventually accidentally exposed at a masked ball when her face covering falls off. Hers and Romeo's reappearance causes massive ructions to the current leaders of the Montague and Capulet houses, Antonio and Reynard respectively. Plots abound and various threats are made to the life and safety of the couple and their children, with Romeo being sentenced for the murder of Paris 20 years before. Eventually, they manage to restore peace to the city and the Houses (more or less) agree to end their feud that is tearing the city apart.

Appropriately enough, this novel feels very play like in its composition and dialogue. It is written in the present tense which usually grates on me, but which seemed to work here.

24. The Ipcress File - Len Deighton

I read this Cold War spy novel now as the author has just died at the age of 97. Unfortunately I have given up on it a little under half way through, as I just cannot get into the writing style, or bring myself to care about any of the characters, or even differentiate between them. There is a great deal of minute detail about the lives of the characters, and the places they find themselves, so it's well researched and written in that sense, but I just found it utterly unengaging. Dramatic scenes were told in a completely flat and undramatic way, e.g. the car crash and death on a mountain road in chapter 6. It's odd how a novel written in 1962, only a few years before I was born, can feel more archaic and harder to understand in some respects than a 19th century classic novel. Disappointing, as I had quite enjoyed the author's novel SS-GB some years ago.

25. The Successor - Ismail Kadare

This is a re-read of this novel by the great Albanian writer, who passed away in 2024. It is a political novel, being a fictionalised version of the probable murder or enforced suicide of the Albanian no 2 leader Mehmet Shehu (the Successor) in 1981, almost certainly at the instigation of the dictator Enver Hoxha (the Guide). It is also though a psychological novel about the essential nature of pathological mistrust, blind loyalty and suspicion, the hallmarks of extreme totalitarian regimes such as the Albanian communist one. It is a very good piece of literature, though I got a little lost in places with some of the imagery.

26. Clear - Carys Davies

This short novel exists on different levels: at one level it is historical fiction set at the time of the notorious Highland clearances where tenant farmers were driven off their land to make way for more profitable activities such as sheep farming. More fundamentally though it is about the relationship between two men in the isolated environment of a fictional island somewhere between the Orkneys and Scandinavia, where the last tenant farmer Ivar ekes out a living, and is joined by a minister of the newly breakaway Free Church of Scotland, John Ferguson, who has been reluctantly tasked with trying to persuade him to leave his island. Shortly after arriving, John has an accident and falls into the sea but is rescued by Ivar. The relationship between the two men and between them and their environment grows, epitomised for me by the richness of the (now extinct) Norn language in developing words for subtly different aspects of the environment, which seems to emphasise the gulf between this small self-contained world and the wider world outside. John's wife Mary arrives as seemingly an almost, but not quite, unwelcome intrusion, and all three leave the island. It would be interesting to explore how the relationship would have developed on the mainland, whether John and Mary would have been as happy as they were before, and whether Ivar could possibly adapt to a wholly different world. Intriguing, and I always love stories set on remote islands.

>33 john257hopper: I added that book to my library in 2024. I came across it while looking for something on the Battle of Culloden. While purchasing that one, I also purchased West, by the same author and thought that the topics could not be further apart! I hope to read West for RTT in quarter 3 and now I hope to get to this one sometime soon!

27. 1980: A Year in the Life of Keith Diamond - Jason Ayres

This is the first in the author's spin off series from his wonderful Time Bubble series. Each book in this second series revolves around a minor character from the first series being given a mysterious bracelet by a stranger which allows them to relive a year exactly 40 years in their past. In this book, Keith Diamond is an overweight semi alcoholic single late middle aged man working as a radio presenter. On new years's eve 31 December 2019 the bracelet takes him back to the crack of the new year in 1980. Initially, he is thrilled by what seems to be the freedom of a simpler age with fewer "nanny state" restrictions on behaviour, compared to the world of 2019. But as the year goes on he comes to see the downsides, in particular the misogyny in his workplace, in which he participated the first time round, but now sees very differently with the benefit of 40 years' hindsight. He also makes unsuccessful attempts to draw attention to the repellent activities of the then universally popular Jimmy Savile, and to draw the police's attention to Peter Sutcliffe in their search for the then unknown Yorkshire Ripper.

The bracelet (which is invisible to everyone else) flashes red or green in order to guide him towards or away from actions designed to do good for him, or other individuals, leading him on an eclectic series of missions, some to save individuals from accidents (skater Robin Cousins, so he can win his gold medal at the Winter Olympics), saving Chelsea Football Club from a takeover by an unscrupulous businessman and, rather incongruously and dramatically, to alert the authorities to an Iranian nuclear terror attack on Wimbledon during the famous 4th set tiebreak in the Borg-McEnroe final. He avoids getting together with a girlfriend that he got pregnant and married in the previous timeline, and at the end gets together with a would be Page 3 model Rachel Summers whom he saved from an early death from drug addiction, by warning her off the dangers of the glamour industry in favour of pursuing education to go into medicine. When he wakes up back on 1 January 2020, Rachel is by his side, as they have been together for the 40 years in the new timeline.

This was mostly enjoyable though I didn't find it quite as satisfying as most of the more SF-based Time Bubble series.

28. Union Station - David Downing

This is the seventh and now definitely final novel in the John Russell/Effi Koenen series set before, during and after the second world war. It is now 1953 and John and Effi and their adopted daughter Rosa are living in Los Angeles. In their adopted home, the scourge of McCarthyism is in full swing and Cold War paranoia is sweeping across many sections of society. Meanwhile back in Effi's home country of the GDR, in an atmosphere of uncertainty and cautious hope following the death of Stalin, Walter Ulbricht's government is unable to satisfy the workers' demands and growing strikes and protests are met with fierce repression by the Soviet armed forces supporting the GDR government. John's old comrade Kurt Strohm completes his disillusionment with the way socialism is in practice being implemented and almost despite himself defects with his family while the border between the sectors of Berlin is still open. Effi is invited back to Berlin for a film festival and so she and John end up being manipulated by the factions on both sides of the Cold War divide, and the deal he made with the Soviet police chief Beria in Masaryk Station to secure his and his family's freedom re-enters the plot. In the end he is able to escape from the coils of the various plotters once again, and they settle back in the US, in the relatively more liberal atmosphere of New York. This was as well written and intricately plotted as ever, though I thought the last chapter was a bit preachy and didactic in its rather overdrawn comparisons between the very real racism and political repression in the US and the exponentially worse repression of Nazi and Communist Germany. So this left a slightly sour taste in my mouth, but this has been an excellent series.

29. Operation Oskar: An East German Spy Novel (Reim Book 2) - Max Hertzberg

This is the second novel in the author's series featuring Lieutenant Reim of the Stasi, set in Berlin in 1983. I have to say I found this mostly very dull. Until the twist in the last few pages, it revolved around Reim going and back and forth between East and West Berlin investigating what seemed to be very petty smuggling of consumer goods across the frontier. The twist was dramatic (no spoilers here) but did not make up for the rest of a story populated for me by characters lacking in any real human interest. It's a pity - the author is himself from the former GDR and worked on the Stasi archives after the Wall fell, so he knows his stuff, but once again I felt he is more comfortable with the non-fiction aspects than telling a story that really grabs the reader (or this reader at least).

30. Torrents of Spring - Ivan Turgenev

This short novel packs quite a punch. Dimitry Sanin is a young Russian man travelling back from Italy to his homeland via Frankfort in Germany when by chance he saves a young man's life and falls for the man's beautiful sister Gemma Roselli. She is engaged to a German man Herr Klüber, but feels an increasing attraction between them. At a dinner, Gemma receives an unwelcome advance from another man von Dönhof, but it is Sanin who challenges his behaviour, not her own fiancé. Sanin and von Dönhof fight a duel at the latter's insistence, but agree there is no case to answer and shake hands. Gemma splits with her fiancé and the relationship develops with Sanin, who gets on very well with the whole family, in particular Emil, the prospective brother in law whose life he had saved.

Up to this point, the novel has felt quite light-hearted and enjoyable, but fairly inconsequential; I was questioning why this appears in lists of 1001 books you should read before you die. But then the novel takes a darker and more dramatic tone. Sanin by chance meets an old school friend Ippolit Polozov, who appears to be under the control of his wife Maria. Sanin negotiates with Maria for the Polozovs to buy his estate, so he can emigrate to be with Gemma. However, Sanin falls increasingly under the spell of Maria, who contrives to spend more and more time with him, and he starts to feel more emotionally distant from Gemma, against his better judgement. By the end he is almost a slave to her and her husband and has written to Gemma breaking off their impending marriage. The whole story takes place within a framework narrative in which Sanin is looking back in later life, having lost the woman he loves and also (how is not clear) broken free of Maria. The story might have ended there but Sanin tracks Gemma down to New York, where she has married and had children, he writes to her and they are reconciled as friends. This denouement perhaps reduces the punch of the novel a bit, but this is a powerful novel about love and obsession.

>38 john257hopper: Adding this one to the wish list. Short is good!

Glad you enjoyed Kindred! I found that one so fantastic, and the tensions well written enough to stand up to rereading.

Making a note of Torrents of Spring, partly because I adored Fathers and Sons when I read it last year.

31. The Granddaughter - Bernhard Schlink

This is the second book I have read by this contemporary German author most famous for his first novel The Reader (which was made into a film starring Kate Winslet).

This novel crosses East and West Germany and the gaps in understanding between Germans of different ideological backgrounds and different generations. Kaspar Wettner is a West German who in 1964 on a trip to East Berlin meets Birgit and they start a relationship. He helps her escape to the West and they stay together. We initially meet Kaspar on the day when, decades later as a much older man who has been struggling to deal with Birgit's alcoholism, he comes across her dead in the bath from an accidental overdose. When going through her things, he comes across her manuscript for a novelised autobiography and realises how little he knew about many aspects of her life, in particular that she had been pregnant when they first met but had given away her baby daughter.

Kaspar decides to go in search of the stepdaughter whose existence he knew nothing about. He begins by finding the adoptive parents of the girl they named Svenja, only to find they have washed their hands of her after she rejected their way of life. Svenja grew up and married Bjorn who was part of a far right German nationalist group wanting to set up their community and reject what they see as the foreign domination of their country. Their daughter, the title character, is Sigrun. Kaspar offers to help the family in Birgit's name and be involved in his step granddaughter Sigrun's life. Bjorn and Svenja agree, mainly for the benefit of the money on offer from Birgit's estate.

The rest of the novel concerns the evolving relationship between Kaspar and Sigrun. He is pleased at her intelligence and determination to achieve success, particularly in learning and practising the piano, including difficult works by Bach and others. At the same time he is exasperated and repelled by her cleaving to the far right nationalist and anti-Semitic views and Holocaust denial she has grown up with as part of her unquestioned world view. Even as her assumptions begin to loosen, she retains an instinctive loyalty to her group, even when they carry out violent acts that eventually result in a death. Sigrun comes across as a highly talented and likeable youngster with a big steak of naivety that comes from her sheltered upbringing. She eventually rejects her parents and goes to Australia to make a new life, but Kaspar feels sure there is still a link between them. I enjoyed this novel but I thought it didn't quite have the impact of The Reader.

32. Arthur & George - Julian Barnes

This is a fictionalised version of a famous miscarriage of justice in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle helped prove the innocence of a mixed race Staffordshire lawyer George Edalji. Edalji was a mild-mannered, bookish and very myopic young man who was bizarrely arrested, tried and convicted of maiming cattle and writing poison pen letters harassing himself and his own family. Doyle only became involved after Edalji had served three years of a seven year prison sentence with penal servitude and was then bizarrely released but not pardoned. Edalji and his supporters were writing to the Home Office and influential people such as Doyle for help. Raw from the recent death of his consumptive first wife, Doyle threw himself into the case despite numerous rebuffs and eventually managed to squeeze a pardon out of the Home Office, but no compensation. As the son of an Indian father, who was probably the first Asian man to be a vicar in the Church of England, and a Scottish mother, George and his siblings were unusual for the time, especially in rural western England. Doyle and other commentators have always argued that racial prejudice was at the heart of the persecution of Edalji, though he himself didn't think his racial origins were the main factor. Aside from the tragic human aspects of the miscarriage of justice, Edalji's case was instrumental in leading to the setting up of the Court of Criminal Appeal; prior to this, there was no direct appeal process against criminal convictions, and plaintiffs had to appeal to the Home Office for an administrative review of their cases.

As a fictionalised double biography, the early sections of the novel consist of rapidly alternating vignettes into the lives of Arthur and George, with longer passages during the crucial events affecting George. I thought some of the digressions into Doyle's much richer life were not really germane to the story and could have been omitted. The final section after Doyle's death in 1930, mostly set at a spiritualist rally at which it was claimed that Doyle ((in)famously a believer in spiritualism) appeared, was I thought the dullest part of the book, though it provided an opportunity for George to reflect on matters of life and death. He lived out the rest of his life peacefully at least, practising law and keeping himself to himself, unmarried and living with his spinster sister Maud. Overall, while an excellent read, I thought the book was just a bit too long.

>41 john257hopper: Agree with the comment about The Reader.

33. The Doings of Raffles Haw - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

This novella has a sort of Jules Verne feel to it to me. The title character is a mysterious and unbelievably rich man who comes to live in the town of Tamfield in the West Midlands, where he befriends Robert McIntyre, a struggling but basically content artist and his sister Laura, who is engaged to a sailor Hector Spurling, son of the local vicar. Haw, despite his wealth, is very modest and down to earth in his personal demeanour and an extremely generous benefactor to the townspeople, who speculate on the source of his wealth. Meanwhile he falls for and proposes to Laura, who reciprocates his feelings despite her engagement, and sends a letter to Hector to break off their engagement. Over time though, the locals become too dependent on Haw's generosity and largesse, and lose their sense of initiative and self-reliance. Robert McIntyre discovers the secret of Haw's wealth, which is that he has in effect discovered the secret of alchemy by bombarding bismuth and lead with electricity to reduce its atomic weight through the cycle of metals until it produces gold. But this does not ultimately benefit him; Hector comes back to claim Laura (having not received her letter) and in shock and humiliation at discovering each other, both Raffles and Hector reject Laura. Raffles in his grief destroys his alchemical equipment and dies. So in the end the lives of Robert and Laura and many people in Tamfield end up worse, despite their benefactor's noble intentions.

34. Points of Danger - Edward Marston

This is the sixteenth novel in the Railway Detective series set in the mid nineteenth century. A Norwich MP is shot at point blank range in front of his distraught wife. The MP's previously estranged son from his first marriage is determined to oust his widowed stepmother from the marital home. As usual many of the local police force resent the intrusion of our Metropolitan Police heroes onto the local scene. Colbeck and Leeming soon have cause to suspect that one or more members of the local constabulary have acted as accessories to the murder. The search for the killer takes Leeming to Yarmouth and the Channel Islands. The final solution to the murder was not one I at all expected for most of the novel until a partial clue towards the end. There were a couple of interesting sub-plots, particularly when Superintendent Tallis is on the brink of a nervous breakdown following his kidnapping and near murder in the previous novel and has to take a lengthy break from work, and one where Colbeck's artistic wife Madeleine receives a very generous commission for a painting which is not all it seems to be. A decent entry in the series though not one of my favourites.

35. The Wolf Den - Elodie Harper

This is the first novel in the author's trilogy about the life of Amara, a prostitute in a brothel in Pompeii. The year is AD 74 (five years before the eruption of Vesuvius destroyed the town). Amara is a doctor's daughter from Greece who, after her father's death, was eventually sold into slavery by her mother when the money ran out, and found herself in a brothel, alongside four other young women. The story is essentially about the relationships between these five women and their master, the brothel owner Felix, a ruthless and hardhearted man. While Amara has grown tougher and more ruthless in many ways herself in having to get used to this life, she is closest to Dido, a softer young lady from (as her name suggests) Carthage. Also in the group, and probably its "queen bee", is Victoria who was rescued from the town rubbish tip as an abandoned baby, so has known no other life, and adapts much more easily to the tough life they lead having to please their master and their many customers. Beronice is an Egyptian who is actually in a relationship with one of Felix's male employees, Gallus, and rounding out the group is Cressa, who has earlier given birth to a son, whom Felix sold away. The lives of these five women are also affected by a long running feud Felix has with a rival brothelkeeper, Simo.

Amara longs to escape her life and among the many clients whom she has to please, some are wealthier, and sometimes kinder men, whom she hopes to use as an avenue for a better life, including none other than the famous Pliny (the Elder) himself. At the same time, against her better judgement, she starts to fall for Menander, a fellow slave originally from Greece and belonging to a local potter, but fights her feelings as she feels sure there can be no future life together for them. Amara is a complex character, sometimes wistfully romantic and yearning for an idyllic future life, other times almost as hardbitten and cynical as Felix, grasping onto the main chance in making financial deals for Felix, or aiming to settle for a patron to whom she would still be a slave, but who might treat her more kindly. The end of the novel is a turning point in Amara's life. This was an excellent read with interesting characters. I had already bought the two sequels and look forward to reading them.

36. Norseman Chief - Jason Born

This is the third in the author's series of novels centred on the exploits of a wandering fictional Viking, Halldorr Olafsson. After firmly leaving his life in Greenland behind, Halldorr is now firmly ensconced with the Algonquin people in what would later be the north east United States. Initially he is their captive saved from death, then as a free man, later a respected warrior and adviser and finally as their chief. He had married his original rescuer Hurit, mother of that previous chief, who he had succeeded in the role, and they become parents to a daughter.

Much of the narrative is taken up with endless battles and skirmishes with neighbouring tribes, including a mission to rescue his daughter, his step granddaughter and a friend's daughter who have been abducted. This endless fighting could risk becoming dull and samey, but somehow does not here, as Born is a good descriptive writer, and creates quite appealing characters. The format of the novel, with Halldorr in extreme old age telling his life's story, is similar to Bernard Cornwell's Uhtred, but I find Halldorr a more likeable character. The novel ends with Halldorr's eventual death at the age of 100, his daughter having succeeded him as chief, but there are two further novels in the series filling in earlier gaps in his long life. I will read them with some pleasure before too long.

37. Five Days in London, May 1940 - John Lukacs

This short book covers five crucial days in late May 1940, 24th to 28th inclusive, after Winston Churchill has taken over as British Prime Minister and in the run up to the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of British and French troops from Dunkirk and the fall of France on 10 June. The author's contention is that it was during these five days that, albeit indirectly and without knowing it at the time, Hitler came closest to winning the war, due to the struggle going on in Churchill's War Cabinet, primarily between him and the foreign secretary Lord Halifax. Halifax had moved increasingly further towards appeasement, even as the man most closely associated with that trend, the previous Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, had moved on from his egregious mistakes and largely supported his successor's leadership. Halifax was seemingly desperate to keep open the possibility of achieving a negotiated peace with Germany in order to preserve the country and Empire in some form, against Churchill's conviction that any accommodation to Hitler would be the end, politically, militarily and morally. This is summed up in one of Churchill's famous quotes: "If Hitler wins and we fall, he said, “then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and care for, will sink into the abyss of a New Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science."

This is a good account of the course of events over these crucial days, covering not only the political and diplomatic twists and turns but also drawing on published and unpublished sources describing how people felt and reacted at the time. That said, I was slightly disappointed in the narrative which I felt focused a bit too much on excessive detail and quotations, and perhaps not quite enough on giving a flavour of just how dark a period this was. It is a cliché, but much of the reaction of British people was phlegmatic, with people still carrying on with their lives as far as possible in many cases, and probably just as well, given what was going on behind the scenes and not covered in the newspapers or radio. Definitely worth a read.

38. The Travels of Sherlock Holmes - John Hall

In this short spin-off novel the Great Detective recounts to Watson, many years afterwards, the true account of what he did during the "Great Hiatus", after his famous encounter with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls in Conan Doyle's The Adventure of the Final Problem. In fact, though, most of this is told through the voice of a British Army officer Lieutenant Dyce, whose account Holmes is giving to Watson. This means that Watson sadly does not really feature in the story, while Holmes is disguised as a mysterious Norwegian man named Sigerson. Holmes's incognito travels in Tibet and Arabia are here explained as part of the "Great Game", the struggle between the British and Russian Empires for hegemony in Asia, as part of which Russia is seeking a warm water port in southern Asia. This is plausible, though rather less so, in my view is the surviving Moriarty's plan to stir up revolution throughout the region, and his own rather sudden and almost offhand demise part way through the book. An enjoyable read though, and feels like an authentic pastiche.

39. The Choice: A true story of hope - Edith Eger

This is one of the most gripping and inspiring books I have read for many years. Edith Eger was a Hungarian-American Holocaust survivor and life-affirmingly inspirational psychiatrist, who died a week or two ago at the age of 98. As a teenager, after the mass deportations of Hungarian Jews in summer 1944, she and her sister Magda survived a year in Auschwitz and on Death Marches, relying totally on each other materially and psychologically to keep themselves alive, after the gassing of their parents immediately upon their arrival at Auschwitz. Their determination to survive brought them through, though at the end they were rescued in May 1945 by a GI barely alive from a pile of corpses. They returned to their home city now in Czechoslovakia, where Edith married and had a daughter, but soon they had to flee when her husband was arrested by the Communist authorities. They planned to flee to Israel, but fortuitously they had a family visa for the US arranged by a distant relative before the war, so moved to America.

Like many survivors, Edith is traumatised by her experiences and cannot bear to talk about it to anyone, even with her husband, another Holocaust survivor, and certainly not their growing family of three children by the late 1950s. But over time Edith meets a famous camp survivor, the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, author of the wonderful book Man's Search for Meaning, and founder of the Logotherapy school of psychiatry. Through him she reaches the conclusion that she must come to terms with her trauma and use the lessons of it to help others deal with trauma in their own lives, whether that be Vietnam War veterans, betrayed spouses or teenage girls with eating disorders. She develops and demonstrates a seemingly limitless capacity for empathy and reaching the most psychologically scarred people.

Eventually she makes the ultimate step towards coming to terms with her past by accepting an invitation to speak at a conference of military chaplains in Berchtesgaden, Hitler's old home base, and then returns to Auschwitz itself, despite the pleadings of some family members and other survivors. This is unbelievably painful for her, but with the support of her husband, she managed it: " I went back to Auschwitz searching for the feel of death so that I could finally exorcise it. What I found was my inner truth, the self I wanted to reclaim, my strength and my innocence". Her ultimate conclusion is that "the biggest prison is in your own mind, and in your pocket you already hold the key: the willingness to take absolute responsibility for your life; the willingness to risk; the willingness to release yourself from judgment and reclaim your innocence, accepting and loving yourself for who you really are—human, imperfect, and whole." Edith Eger is a very strong willed and reflective person, and very human in all its multi-various colours and dimensions, and this is a wonderful book.

>50 john257hopper: Am going to secure this book. Sounds very much like Elie Wiesel (Night), who couldn't speak for over 10 years about the Holocaust.

Also I guess I need to find a good book about Neville Chamberlain!

>51 Tess_W: This book has gone into my short list of some of the most inspiring and personally influential books I have read in my life, along with Man's Search for Meaning.

>52 john257hopper: I have Frankl's book on my shelf and I do need to get to it! I think I know where I got my "ideas" about Chamberlain, and I am embarrassed to say it was from the movie 'The Darkest Hour.' Of course, the movie had to embellish the "bad" guys for Hollywood's sake! Actually, here in the U.S., all we study is Chamberlain's speech when he gets off the plane from Munich, even at the college graduate level.

>53 Tess_W: Well, also here, that is all that most people know about Chamberlain, "Peace in our time" and the very first instance of shuttle diplomacy, and an ignominious one.

40. The Honjin Murders - Seishi Yokomizo

This was the first in a series of murder mysteries featuring a private investigator called Kosuke Kindaichi, written by an author described as Japan's answer to Agatha Christie (though I understand other authors have also been described as such). First published just after the Second World War, it is set in 1937 in a traditional rural community, where bloodline and lineage are all important. The heir to an estate Kenzo Ichiyanagi is found dead and covered in blood on his wedding night together with his new wife, a teacher Katsuko Kubo, in a completely locked and inaccessible annexe to the main house on the estate. The marriage had been disapproved of by most of the young man's family, in particular his dowager mother. At around the same time, a three-fingered man with a scar on his upper face and a mask covering his lower face was seen in the area, a very obvious, and indeed too obvious, suspect. The true solution to the locked room mystery is ingenious as an intellectual puzzle, though it involves some very bizarre and convoluted mental processes on the part of some of the characters. The murderer was abetted by another character obsessed with locked room murder mysteries and their authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, John Dickson Carr and Gaston Leroux, and I found this other character's precise motivations rather obscure. A simply and laconically told story, with prose pared down to the essentials, and no physical character descriptions, this was Intellectually quite stimulating, and I will read the others in the series that have been translated into English.

41. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

This is a re-read of one of the great literary classics of the 20th century which I first read at school. In fact I think it is arguably the seminal novel of the 20th century in its depiction of a totalitarian society and totalitarian mental attitudes and practices. People sometimes claim that aspects of contemporary western societies are becoming like this, particularly in terms of surveillance, but I think this is a very superficial comparison; I think such claims fail to understand the all pervasive nature of totalitarianism, as distinct from illiberalism or authoritarianism, as practiced in Oceania, the closest equivalents to which have been Stalin's USSR at the time the novel was written, and North Korea now. It is a seminal and gripping novel about freedom and how human beings react and behave and think, and how that can be moulded and distorted. I felt the drama and horror of it anew even though I am very familiar with the plot and narrative and can recall many chunks of the texts off by heart from previous readings. Everyone should read this.

>56 john257hopper: I need to read this! I love Orwell, especially Animal Farm to explain communism. I've started this book several times and have not finished it.

>57 Tess_W: I'll have to re-read this as well, it's been nearly 20 years since I last read it.

42. The Woman in White (Play) - Wilkie Collins

This is the script of a theatrical version of Wilkie Collins's most famous novel, adapted by himself for the stage in 1871 just over a decade after the novel was published. As an epistolary novel, the translation to the stage necessitated a lot of change, and the play obviously could not build up an atmosphere in quite the same way, with the script focusing on direct interaction between the characters, and making the emphasis on the characteristics of Count Fosco as the main villain of the piece. Worth a read if you know the novel.

43. Julia: 1984 - Sandra Newman

As its title suggests, this is a retelling of George Orwell's 1984 from the point of view of the leading female character Julia (here surnamed Worthing, she had no surname in the original), and apparently commissioned by the Orwell estate. This is a fascinating idea and the retelling of classics from a different character's point of view is quite a popular sub-genre, but for me this was only partially successful. It was interesting to hear about her encounters with Winston Smith from her point of view, and her experiences in the hostel where she lived, and there was a lot of focus on sexual relationships (all illegal and called sexcrime in Oceania), which Orwell could not have covered in the same way in a novel written in 1948. We knew from 1984 that Julia had had many lovers, and that this was an expression of her passively rebellious attitude towards the totalitarian prudishness of the Big Brother regime, but here she is entrapping men (including Winston's friends Parsons and Ampleforth) on behalf of the Thought Police in partnership with O'Brien, which I found disappointing and sad (though she does appear to have some genuine feelings for Winston).

After the famous scene where they are caught in the upstairs room in Charrington's shop, though, Julia is appalled to discover that she has been betrayed by O'Brien and is also taken prisoner and tortured in the notorious Ministry of Love. The descriptions of torture here are very graphic and in places quite stomach churning and I thought excessive. I wondered how the novel would end once the broken Julia and Winston are released (pending their re-arrest and execution) and this was probably the most disappointing aspect from a literary point of view; the Big Brother regime seems to collapse suddenly like a deck of cards in a rebellion led by the semi or entirely mythical Brotherhood, who seem to be set to behave in a very similar way to the regime they have overthrown (as per the theory of the High, Middle and Low in the alleged Goldstein book). I didn't find this at all convincing really and the whole experience left me feeling slightly empty and disappointed in a way that's difficult to describe. So this is a slightly ambiguous rating of 3.5/5.
`

44. Doctor Who: Last of the Gaderene - Mark Gatiss

This Doctor Who spin off novel features the Third Doctor and Jo Grant, set after the Time Lords end his exile on Earth, and I think after the TV story Frontier in Space as the Master features here and appears to die at the end. This is in many ways a Pertwee UNIT story by numbers, aliens invading Earth aided by the Master, with our UNIT heroes helping the Doctor and Jo and others repel them. The Gaderene came to Earth during the Second World War and have been biding their time for several decades gathering their strength for their main invasion force to land and take over the planet. In the end they are defeated with the help of a wartime Spitfire pilot using his plane to destroy the channel through which the invasion is to be effected. This was a competently told story but somehow didn't really engage me.

45. Shieldwall - Justin Hill

This is a re-read of this historical novel set in the time of Anglo Saxon King Ethelred and Danish invader King Canute, just over 1000 years ago, prompted by the author's co-hosting of a podcast about the writing of historical adventure fiction. The main protagonist here is young Godwin Wulfnothson, better known later in life for his rivalry with King Edward the Confessor and being the father of King Harold II of Battle of Hastings fame. Its a very well written and absorbing novel, and I liked the contrast between the scenes of politics and battles, and the domestic life of Godwin's estate. It is a colourful and turbulent time in English history, replete with struggle for the future of the English nation, and sadly much less well known that the more famous invasion by William of Normandy 50 years later. Great stuff.

>62 john257hopper: This sounds like something I would love! I just have a quick question: It looks like the first of an unfinished trilogy. Does it read well enough as a standalone?

>62 john257hopper: Will put this book on my "list." I read quite about about Ethelred and Canute in Cornwell's The Saxon Chronicles series. Good stuff!

>63 Tanya-dogearedcopy: Hi Tanya. Yes, it can be read as a standalone. Indeed the trilogy has never been finished as the second book Viking Fire came out around 10 years ago I think and the third has still not appeared.

>64 Tess_W: Hi Tess. Similar period, though Ethelred and Canute were around a century later than Uhtred :).

There is a character in Cornwell's series called Ethelred of Mercia, but he is a later figure.

>66 john257hopper: Ahhhh, thanks for the info!

46. Beloved - Toni Morrison

This seminal book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 and in 1993 its author was the first, and so far only, black woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. It shows the lives of former enslaved black people and how their horrific experiences have shaped their psyche and every aspect of their lives. I noticed in particular her use of the terms "whitegirl" and "coloredpeople", etc, as one word, presumably to denote their utterly different life experiences and identities. The novel is told in a disjointed, stream of consciousness way that I have to admit I just don't get on with as a writing style and the magical realism aspect is also usually not to my taste. I understand why Morrison chose to write the book in this way and the powerful impact that can have on many readers, but I am afraid it is not a style I can get on with and I have, with some reluctance, abandoned it just under half way through. I might return to it one day, though.

47. The Queen Dowager: Lady Elfrida: England's First Queen (The King's Mother Book 2) - M J Porter

This is the second in the author's trilogy of novels about this Anglo Saxon queen, wife of King Edgar and mother of the notorious King Ethelred (the Unready). This covers the years when she is coming back into favour with her son and struggling with Earldorman Ethelwine for influence over him. A lot of the events are speculation as her precise actions during this time are not known, which is fair enough, though I find both mother and son rather annoying as characters here. More seriously, as with the previous novel, my enjoyment of this was reduced by the large number of typographical, punctuation and grammatical errors, in places one or more on every page. The author is very prolific in churning out novels in several partly interlocking series, mostly about Saxon England, but I have to say she should perhaps refocus her efforts and spend a bit more time quality assuring her novels rather than producing so many.

>69 john257hopper: I envy your knowledge of early Britain. I barely recognize anything before the Yorks and really don't "know" much before the Stuarts (which of course, is where most US history studies begin). The new Standards for Western Civ I in my state begin with Henry VIII's break with the church and jump directly to James I.

>70 Tess_W: Thanks Tess. While my first real historical love with the Tudors, I read more about or set in earlier periods these days, especially Medieval Britain.

48. Nero - Conn Iggulden

This is the first in a trilogy of novels by the author following the life of one of Rome's most notorious emperors. This first one in fact covers only the first five or six years of his life, so he is hardly in it for long stretches, the main character being his mother Agrippina. The novel traces the history of the Julio Claudians from shortly before the death of Tiberius and the accession of Caligula (Agrippina's surviving brother) in AD 37, then leaping forward four years to the assassination of Caligula and proclamation of his uncle Claudius as Emperor in AD 41, then again going forward to the Claudian invasion of Britain in AD 43 (told partly from the Britons' perspective). This is well written, perforce grim and horrible and dramatic, given the events of these years. Some events are handled differently from the usually accepted version, including the death of Claudius's wife Messalina, and the identity of Agrippina's hard done by second husband, whom she ruthlessly gets rid of so she can became Empress by marrying her uncle Claudius. Horribly gripping stuff.

49. On the Beach - Nevil Shute

This is an excellent, horrific and haunting Cold War post-apocalyptic novel written in 1957 and set in the near future of 1963 in a south eastern Australia which is one of the few parts of the world free from the effects of nuclear war that has wiped out Europe, North America and Asia. At the outset of the novel, it is the Antipodean summer and the Christmas-New Year period, and only parts of South America, South Africa and the Antipodes survive, as the deadly radiation inexorably creeps south, with the prediction that the whole world will be wiped out by September. The characters exist in a bizarre half world, in which most people continue to go about their lives as normally as they can, even planning for the future in terms of planting crops or trees for the following year. There is little of the panic and extreme hedonistic behaviour that is often seen in post-apocalyptic novels and indeed in real life apocalyptic historical scenarios such as the Black Death. This struck me as somewhat implausible and perhaps a reflection of the mores of the time the novel was written. Nevertheless, it gave the (some what stereotypical 1950s) characters and the narrative through which they moved a certain dignified pathos that I found moving, as events crept towards the final inevitable end, with most people choosing to die through taking officially distributed suicide pills rather than letting the effects of radiation poisoning run their full course. This was an electric and gripping read, fundamentally depressing but very stark and thought provoking about the nature of human relations, loyalty and managing in a crisis.

>73 john257hopper: I read that about 40-50 years ago! It was very good "then." Perhaps it has aged a bit? However, there are also 2 movie versions: one starring Gregory Peck and one starring Armand Assante. I've seen them both and they are both mediocre, with the Assante one maybe a bit better as co-stars are Aussies, bringing a bit more authenticity.

>74 Tess_W: the dialogue and characters have definitely aged, but the atmosphere the novel creates won out over this for me. It was written in the 1950s and set only a few years later, so I was not surprised by gender relations and so on depicted here.

50. The Picture of Dorian Grey (13 chapter version) - Oscar Wilde

This is a re-read of this Gothic classic, which was Wilde's only novel/novella, as distinct from his many short stories. The basic premise is of course really well known, and the thing to record is that this is the shorter 13 chapter version originally published in June 1890 in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, not the 20 chapter version published in book form the following year and which is nearly always the version read nowadays. This shorter original version was more notorious than its successor, by the mores of the 1890s, in its description of homo-erotic relations, and was famously described by the Daily Chronicle as “unclean, poisonous and heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction". In fact, the manuscript submitted by Wilde for publication in the magazine had already been censored without his knowledge before it appeared to remove other homosexual references, and other material deemed unsuitable; this original manuscript was not published until 2011. The atmosphere of decadence and moral corruption is very well conveyed through quite lurid and colourful description, without it ever really being specific about the nature of Dorian's shameful activities. The artist Basil Hallward is the pivotal character in the novel in being the creator of the eponymous painting and also one of its subject's victims. Powerful stuff.

51. The Marriage Portrait - Maggie O'Farrell

This novel was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2023. Like the author's most famous novel Hamnet, this is historical fiction, in this case based around the short life of Lucrezia de Medici, daughter of Duke Cosimo of Tuscany, who is married off aged 15 to Alfonso d'Este, Duke of Ferrara. Her husband commissions the painting to mark their marriage, but more fundamentally this novel is about how her young life is taken over by her husband. Initially this happens in quite an affectionate and tender way, certainly by the standards of the time, but acquires more sinister characteristics over time (though the marriage only lasts a year or so), as he reveals the ruthless side of his nature through punishment of his subjects, whether it be his sister and her lover when they are caught, or even a servant for the trivial mishap of tripping over and dropping some papers. Eventually Lucrezia escapes in order to save her life from Alfonso's retribution for the crime of not having fallen pregnant with a son; she is still only 16 when all this happens. The real historical Lucrezia apparently died of tuberculosis at that age, though there were rumours she had been poisoned. As with O'Farrell's other novels, this is beautifully written and tragically evocative, for example in the description of how Lucrezia sees, and at the same time does not see, herself in the finished portrait, and thinks that now Alfonso has the timeless, ageless portrait, he does not need her. As with Hamnet, I occasionally got slightly confused with the jumping about in time, but this is another powerful novel from this author.

52. Marriage - Nikolai Gogol

I quite enjoyed this short (2 act) whimsical play, about a man Ivan Podkolyosin looking for a wife but who is reluctant to compromise in his life, and a woman Agafya Tikhonovna who thinks she is looking for a husband but who also seems reluctant to commit. She is presented by a matchmaker with half a dozen potential suitors including Podkolyosin. Numerous misunderstandings result which make this an amusing and undemanding read unlike many of Gogol's other works.