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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