Second paragraph of third chapter:

Climb a little over scrubby branches and broken thorns that catch at the hems of wanderers, and one will reach a promontory that bulges from the land to peek up like a naughty child between fingers of faded leaf and broken stone, commanding a view upon sea and town, the crooked roofs of the palace and curling groves of rough-boughed trees. This is not usually a place disturbed by human voices, being a solitary kind of local fit for a prowling lynx or yellow-beaked hunting bird. Yet now as we draw near, we may hear something truly remarkable for Ithaca – not merely voices, but that most unusual combination of melodies – a man and a woman, speaking together.

So, it’s the climax of the excellent trilogy of novels by Claire North, following Ithaca and House of Odysseus, in which the goddess Athena tells us how Odysseus returns to Penelope and Ithaca, bringing more violence with him; and there is a final reckoning with the suitors and their relatives. The scene where Odysseus wreaks undeserved vengeance on Penelope’s servants is particularly and horribly well done, as is the sequence where Odysseus, Penelope and their supporters are holed up in a stockade, Wild West style, waiting for the bad guys to attack. There are lots of beautifully done small moments too, many of them reflecting on gender and power. This was a great set of books, and they deserve to be better known. You can get The Last Song of Penelope here.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

These are the things the poets say she shall dream of.

Second of Claire North’s excellent Penelope trilogy, this time narrated by the goddess Aphrodite, with our heroine still waiting for her husband (who is dallying far away with the nymph Calypso), and also dealing with the desperately ill Orestes and the greedy Menelaus, kings of adjoining cities on the mainland whose quarrel is being played out in Ithaca. There is also a locked-room murder mystery for Penelope to solve, with the help of Helen who is vividly sketched as a character.

I was reading this at the same time as Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad (review coming soon) but actually my mind kept turning to Roger Lancelyn Green’s The Luck of Troy, told from the point of view of Nicostratus, Helen’s son by Menelaus who accompanied her to Troy at the start of the war. Nicostratus is a key character here as well, but North has him as Menelaus’ illegitimate son, full of resentment and an all round bad guy who is at the centre of the murder mystery. North’s characterization is very memorable, even of names who have been talked about for millennia.

You can get House of Odysseus here.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Of these, the three men and the boy consider themselves the most pertinent. They stand round a table of yew set with shards of tortoiseshell, and bicker.

This is the first of a trilogy about Odysseus’ wife Penelope, waiting for him to return to Ithaca (if he ever will), balancing the interests of the suitors who have come to try and persuade her to marry them, narrated by the goddess Hera who is observing closely and just occasionally interfering to counter the interference of Athena, Artemis and the others.

Ithaca is being raided by pirates, supposedly Illyrians from the north; it doesn’t take the reader, or Penelope, long to work out what is really going on – one of the suitors is behind it; it takes a lot longer to sort out, given the male domination of legitimate violence, even in a kingdom ruled by a woman. In the meantime Clytemnestra has fled Mycenae and her vengeful children, and the consequent instability is spreading west to Ithaca too. It’s all convincingly told, in the constraints of myth.

I have generally enjoyed Claire North’s books, and I enjoyed this too; and now that I realise there are another two books to go, I’ll be getting them. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2022. Next on that pile is Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Water evaporates, the heat pushing it higher and higher until suddenly it is too high, condensing around particles of soot and ash billowed into the heavens by the blaze.

Occasionally I hit a book by a favourite author that doesn’t quite work for me, and I’m afraid this is one of those times. I’m generally a big fan of North’s writing, and I’m also a big fan of A Canticle for Leibowitz, to which this is in part a response. It’s the story of a future scholar dedicated to retrieving past knowledge in a post-apocalypse society, where rival power structures have mutually entangled espionage networks and cosmic principles are embodied.

I didn’t especially like any of the characters, but what put me off more was that although the story is mainly set in the cities and countryside of a devastated Central Europe, there is very little sense of place; the cities are interchangeable and everyone seems to speak the same language. This detachment from geography threw me right out of the narrative. Most people seem to like it much more than me. You can get it here.

A Bechdel fail, I think; mostly first-person narrative and a male protagonist. But I may have missed an exception.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2021. Next on that pile is When Voiha Wakes, by Joy Chant, which I picked up at Novacon (where I also acquired COVID).

Second paragraph of third chapter:

…in a land of rain…

I very much liked four of the previous five books I have read by Claire North – The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Touch, The Sudden Appearance of Hope and 84k – and also enjoyed seeing her at Novacon a year ago.

I’m afraid The End of the Day fell into the less good category for me. The writing as ever is good,and there are some lovely vignettes, but I did not quite gel with the central plot concept: Charlie, the protagonist, has been recruited to be the harbinger of Death, who together with the other three Horsemen of the Apocalypse is active in today’s world; bad guys are trying to interfere with Death, and there’s some incidental observations on US politics that didn’t really come together for me. Still, liking four out of six books by her is not bad and I’ll still be looking to buy more. You can get this one here.

This was the top unread book on my shelves acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is Ratlines, by Stuart Neville.