Historical Fiction Books > B Historical Fiction Books

sad story plumbs depths of human tenacity

Advantages: occasionally moving; well written
Disadvantages: sad; heavy-going

This is a wide ranging novel, whose overall theme would seem to be that there is no end to what men can endure. Throughout the novel, pain and fear are the dominant feelings; mud and blood are the prominent visuals. Although this is typically considered a great novel, I am not convinced that I enjoyed reading this novel, because I, personally, prefer a different style of writing. Stephen Wraysford is a young man visiting Amiens, France in 1910 at ...
...the wife of his host, a young woman trapped in a loveless, passionless marriage, and the first part of the novel is concerned with their passionate journey together. The relationship develops so swiftly as to be almost unbelievable and none of the characters comes across as particularly likeable, despite the sad back stories the lovers are given by Faulkes. Soon the action moves to the trenches in France where Jack Firebrace, a miner, is listening ...

brokenangelkisses 09.11.2008 · Read full review
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Review of Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

Slavery Made Real

Advantages: Compelling story that is destined to be a classic.
Disadvantages: Emotionally draining, a hard read

BELOVED TONI MORRISON Is there anyone who has not come across 'Beloved'? If there is I would really recommend that you beg, borrow or steal (perhaps not steal!) a copy and read is ASAP. This book written by Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winning author Toni Morrison is an incredible, albeit disturbing book. This book is extraordinary on so many different levels, it is one that you will never forget, I guarantee that. This book is very graphic ...
...night and imagine I'd seen Beloved standing beside my bed. The character was actually haunting me, but she haunted Sethe both physically and emotionally. This is not the book to be reading alone at night! Everyone is haunted in this book and not just by Beloved. They all try to exorcise ghosts of enslavement, robbed dignity, physical pain, and their own inadequacies. Beloved focuses on slavery, shocking the reader with various accounts of events ...

oldchem 10.11.2009 · Read full review
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Review of Beloved - Toni Morrison

Broken Boundaries

Advantages: Her finest novel to date.
Disadvantages: contraversial

...a readers' perceptions of life. Border Crossing is such a challenging read, on a theme that is truly apt to today’s social problems, that of children who commit crimes. The storyline. Tom Seymour, a child physchologist, has already got more problems than he can cope with, a failing marriage, where he sees his wife only at weekends, his failure to get Lauren, his wife to conceive a child and an ongoing three-year research project, which takes up ...
...well. He has crossed the border into Danny’s life. Is he too being manipulated?. Was the suicide really planned by Danny?. These questions and more fill his head. His one true sounding board is Martha, who seems to be the only person that has a deeper insight into Danny’s character. However, she is due to go to a wedding and cannot call it off. This leaves Tom alone with Danny, who is about to tell Tom of the day of the murder. The tale is harrowing ...

Elffriend 21.07.2004 · Read full review
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Review of Border Crossing - Pat Barker

Baudolino, I love you!

Advantages: A great novel
Disadvantages: No one

...His way of speaking about Baudolino and about his shameless lies is so beautiful and pregnant, that he made rediscover the sweetness and the agility, the oneness of the Italian language. For a long time I didn't read Italian authors, so Eco helped me in rediscover a bit of love for my mothertongue. The story of Baudolino is simple, there is nothing in the history in itself that should make this book special, because the history can be reassumed in ...
...the death of his father-in-law, Baudolino will keep on wandering to follow his dreams, visiting mythical landscapes and interacting with medieval characters. The ability that makes Baudolino very peculiar is only that of telling histories, histories that become real in the same moment in which he speaks about them. It will spend his life pursueing his histories and always inventing new histories, to have even more life to live. That's all. As you ...

shaoli2 25.05.2004 · Read full review
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Review of Baudolino - Umberto Eco

On the other end of the book 'Quentins - Maeve Binchy'.

Advantages: Very good one with spectacular explanantion of feelings and feel is still smelled with love.
Disadvantages: I think she left the role of others

When I read this I felt that It is good and I like the ending of it. Many struggle hard to plan the ending of the start but I am sure that she did her job perfectly and it suited to the book ably. Perfect plotting of the plan. I can call it as one of the best as I like it the most. The character of "Ella Brady" is nice and I think she tried hard to keep her feeling alive til the end. And the other is about the restaurant for which she deciphered ...

s.vinaykumar 01.12.2009 · Read full review
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Review of Quentins - Maeve Binchy