Quote:
Originally Posted by queentess
Here's a list of some potentials I've gleaned from forums here. Let me know if I'm on the right track or if there's anything else you can recommend.
|
Of those I know something about
:
Heyer writes "Regency Romances", and is probably the best there is at that particular genre. She has vivid characters and sly humor. I know a fair number of folks whose sentiments might be summed up as "I don't
like Romance. But I like Georgette Heyer!"
Quote:
|
George MacDonald Fraser (Flashman series)
|
Historical, yes. Romance, no. Harry Flashman is the bully in "Tom Brown's School Days". He's self-centered, a coward, and a bully. The books cover his checkered career in the military, trying to look out for Number One and get rich while avoiding anything that looks like work or danger. For instance, he's in the US Civil War as a Major in the Union Army, shifting to
Staff Colonel in the Confederate Army (because Staff brass aren't normally expected to actually
fight.) He's pretty much the definition of an anti-hero.
If you can take them with the appropriate amount of salt and tolerate Harry, they're fun, in part because Fraser does impeccable research, and uses liberal footnotes, like the one on one book that states the agitator dragged away by the police in a crowd
could have been a young Karl Marx...
Quote:
Antonia Byatt (Possession) (potentially too "literary")
John Fowles (The French Lieutenant's Woman)
|
If Antonia Byatt is 'potentially too "literary"', so is John Fowles.
The book is inspired by the 1823 novel Ourika, by Claire de Duras, which Fowles translated to English during 1977. I suppose it's a romance, but it's also an extended meditation on various themes, with three separate endings proposed by the author. You might call it a "meta-romance". It's a serious book, not light reading.
______
Dennis