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The Lost Kings

By Bruno Hare


       
Quiet young watchmaker Cyril Hare yearns for adventure, and one day a dying man staggers into his London shop and dies. He leaves behind a mysterious watch, and Cyril leaves behind his ordinary life taking ship for India in order to discover more about it. What he does find is more adventure than he could possibly imagine, mostly taken in the company of tall tale teller and general rascal Sir Paul Lindley-Small.

They don’t make them like this anymore says new author Bruno Hare, but actually they do as he has just written this book…and a jolly good thing too. If you, like this reviewer, love the novels of authors like Rider Haggard and Kipling then this is definitely your bag. You can find pretty much everything you can imagine in here if you have read these other works, from mountain villages filled with the descendents of lost kings to assassins, treasures, dodgy soldiers and more.

Interleaved with Cyril’s diary are letters sent to him by Small in 1908, when Small is on his own journey to discover a fabulous creature in the icy wastes of Norway. Small regales his old friend with a series of remarkably inventive tales that could grace an anthology of horror tales in their own right. These involve such diverse objects as shoes, missing children, taxidermists and the kraken and certainly keep the pages turning, although they also break up the thrilling narrative of the pair’s earlier Indian adventure in a way that sometimes spoils its momentum. Now steampunk is fashionable (not that this novel can be described in this way but it would probably appeal to fans of this genre) maybe we might get a few more novels in this long-lost style? I can only hope that they are all as good as this unmissable treat.

The Book


Simon and Schuster UK
1 October 2010
Trade paperback
1847372937 / 9781847372932
General/Historical Adventure /1893 India and Norway
More at Amazon US || UK
Excerpt
NOTE: Some gory parts

The Reviewer

Rachel A Hyde
Reviewed 2010
NOTE:
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