Madison Smartt Bell: All Souls' Rising

[Mirabell]

All Souls? Rising is an excellent novel that leads you into a strange world full of memorable characters and dark and troublesome stories, and into the swamps of history, where easy judgments are thwarted but moral conscience and commitment is never abandoned. (...) This is a novel rich with ideas and that each and everyone works. The writing is good, bordering on sumptuous. It?s clearly more than adequate to its subject but then, it doesn?t really add much. Bell works through structure, characters and images, not language; his language is clean and poetical, but really not above the level of any good historical novel, although he does avoid the trap of faux-high-brow writing that is so ubiquitous in the genre. All Souls? Rising is a very good book that draws you in, it makes for compulsive reading and a challenging one, at that.

from my review here
Lessons: Madison Smartt Bell’s “All Saints’ Rising” shigekuni. (http://shigekuni.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/lessons-madison-smartt-bells-all-saints-rising/)


looking forward to the other vols. ordered one already.

[LRiley]

Not only All soul's rising but the two followups are great historical fiction as well--they being Master of the crossroads and The stone that the builder refused.