Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry
THE revisionist western, McMurtry’s frontier masterpiece follows two legendary Texas Rangers as they undertake an epic cattle drive the length of the America. With truly storming characters, dialogue and relationships, it begins like a piece of heartwarming nostalgia and get progressively darker…
The American Civil War, Shelby Foote
This humongous narrative history of the American Civil War took Foote twenty years to write and it doesn’t take much less long to read. Events that seem at times part of an ancient world and at others shockingly modern, put together with a novelist’s eye for character, theme, and style.
LA Confidential, James Ellroy
Stylish, tough, punchy and uncompromising noir, exploring the bright lights and the seedy shadows of LA, written from tight point of view, each chapter suffused with the voice and attitudes of its narrator. Three detectives – a world-weary veteran, an idealistic career man, and a tough-as-nails bruiser – each come at a mystery with their own distinctive style, and through their own personal lens.
Q, Luther Blissett
An off-beat episodic novel about the 16 th century Protestant Reformation written by a four-person Italian collective using the name of an 80s Watford and Milan footballer. What’s not to like?
The Quincunx, Charles Palliser
This complex, baffling, multi-layered tome is both a love-letter to Dickens and an incredibly compelling mystery, as a young boy orphaned in victorian England maps out his labyrinthine family tree, and seeks the colossal inheritance which he has been denied.
