This was a long-ago recommendation from , and a great read: perhaps reflecting a bit the fall of the Wall and globalisation more generally, it’s about an encounter between cultures, the dour market-driven frozen colony of Caledony being forced to open up to the rest of the galaxy and in partiicular to the romantic troubadours of New Occitan. Lots of interesting politics and general growing-up for our Occitanian narrator as he realises more about the problems of his own society as a result of his Caledonian experience. I’ll hunt out the rest of this series now.
Related
A book that’s very much on my “to get” list – though I’m waiting for the moment to see if it comes out in a paperback edition. From a look I took at it some weeks back, I was favourably impressed by his chapter on Burgundy – my memory is that I spotted a few errors, and one or two details that were omitted but probably shouldn’t have been, but the history of the many states called Burgundy over the past 1500 years is so complex that I would have been amazed not to have done so. And I’ll admit that I looked at the chapter precisely because it lies outside his main areas of expertise and I knew it would be difficult to do well (he does distinctly better than the relevant Wikipedia article, which is itself far better than most accounts I’ve seen). In general the selection of “vanished kingdoms”, while obviously somewhat arbitrary, seems to be sensible – though obviously influenced by Davies selecting stories he wants to tell.