Bibliography, May 2024

BOTM: P. Fitzgerald, At Freddie's (1982)

A. Sattin, Nomads (2021)
A.B. Edwards, A thousand miles up the Nile (1876)
L. Booth, (ed.), Wisden cricketers Almanack (2024)
T. Fort, The A303 (2012)
R. Jefferies, After London (1885)
R. Zelazny, The best of Roger Zelazny (2023)

It is my firm, increasing, and possibly counterintuitive, contention that the greatest decade for novel-writing is the 1980s. This month has added evidence to this. I'm 80% of the way through McCarthy's 1985 Blood Meridian, but I think it would have lose out anyway to Fitzgerald's 1982 novel. This is one of her best books (along with The beginning of spring). It's marvelously evocative of 1960s theatre, with slight characters given real flesh with high levels of economy. It's short, but lingering. I think it takes a reputational hit from its lightness, but it is quite dark, it's just disguised by tone.

As an aside, Nomads was poor. If you were looking for both a decent history of the nomad empires of he steppe set in the context of the wider nomadic societies of the world, you would have been very disappointed - as I was. It's musings plus Mongols. He also appears not to know what words mean. At one point he referred, with numbers, to a 40% reduction from the Black Death as a decimation,  and oligarchic selection by soldiery as 'Mongol democracy'. It drove me up the wall.