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One I hadn't heard before: the modern Indian novel & Dickens. I remember when reading A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry and thinking, this form feels familiar; it's an apt comparison. I did like Dickens while completing my English major (I know, slacker...).
Also, thank you for the review!
Oh gloriosky, I can buy the book as an ebook, online, as of tomorrow. I won't say where, lest that be interpreted as shilling, but OH MY, ebooks are making headway when books just out are available in e format.
I always prefer my trilogies as ebooks :)
geez, it is so obscure. i will perhaps listen.
Perhaps Laura Miller is Sylvia Beach and/or Ezra Pound.
One of my favorite novels last year was a big, brash swashbuckler called "The Religion" by an Englishman named Tim Willocks. It's set in the 16th century during the Battle of Malta, when the Turks wanted to conquer the island to serve as a launching pad for an invasion of the European mainland. It's also supposed to be the first in a trilogy. So, to Ms. Miller's point, perhaps the tradition isn't completely dead in the West?
Well-written historical fiction is a great pleasure, taking us someplace we could never go ourselves - the past. The work may not be a completely faithful recreation of it, of course, but hopefully a reasonably close facsimile.
I find high-art fiction to be mostly pretentious, and written more for the peculiarities of politically correct university faculty sensibilities than for any casual reader who isn't averse to learning something but who also wants to be entertained.
