Brooks: March

Geraldine Brooks' March is based on a great idea: in Louisa Mary Alcott's Little Women, the ladies of the March household are alone since Mr. March has gone to the Civil War. Mr. March's account does not appear in Little Women, so Brooks writes it. And with stunning skill: the language appears adequately old-fashioned; the abolitionist ideas and the slave owners' perspectives are both depicted very plausibly. It's sometimes hard to remember this is a work of fiction.

The real surprise, however, is the village of Concord, MA. Real life characters like Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Thoreau (all residents of Concord) appear on the pages. It is even mentioned that Thoreau had an affair with .. well, just read the book.

Time travelling is popular

Scarlet Thomas' The End of Mr Y. is really a captivating mixture of science, sex, books, conspiracies and time travel.

I wonder why there seems to be time travel in every other book that I read now-a-days, including Making History (Stephen Fry), Rant (Chuck Palahniuk) and the Thursday Next books by Jasper Fforde.