R. Adams, The memories of Milo Morai (1986)
J. Aiken, Black hearts in Battersea (1964)
S. Altun, The Sultan of Byzantium (2011)
S. Barnes, A la recherche de cricket perdu (1989)
R. Bassett, Last days of Old Europe (2019)
A. Burgess, The kingdom of the wicked (1985)
N. Gaiman, The Sandman 5: A game of you (1993)
R.N. Lebow, Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives!: a world without world war I (2014)
T. Pratchett, Soul music (1994)
S. Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956)
It gives me no pleasure to report that the Turkish thriller about a secret society based on the last line Byzantine Emperors is terrible; nor that the imagination of a counterfactual world where WW1 does not happen is also extremely poor. They are both books to avoid. By contrast there are three books on here that are excellent. Sam Selvon's novel on the early Caribbean migrants into Britain is both important and a delight to read. It sort of peters out towards the end, but it is well worth immerses yourself in. Of course, my preferred nostalgic past is not the bedsits of the 1950s, but the lost world of late imperial aristocracy, preferably Habsburg. Richard Bassett thinks so too, and his memoir of his Central European career, and his encounters with the flotsam of the Habsburg world as the cold war ended is just marvellous. Yet again, it makes me curse my stupidity in spending time in Zagreb when Trieste was right there, and it it is enthralling, as well as very nicely done.
However, best of all was the vastly less warm, though vastly awarded, narrative of the horror-show of Belgian colonialism in the Congo. As we all know now, for Belgian, read personal possession of the King of Belgium. It's tight, clear, and very good on the sheer recency of it all. I also very much appreciated the end, where we get both context on other colonial regimes too (a bad reading of it would single out Belgian / Leopoldine methods alone) and on the weak Belgian reckoning with its own history (the infamous Congo museum was a frequent venue for school trips for me). I don't know the story or nineteenth century Africa as well as I should. This is a critical addition to that. And it's told very well.
