From Australia, come these very kind words on Richard Blake, the critically-acclaimed, etc, etc….:
Richard Blake is a poet of the unusual, and not the least unusual thing about his action-books is that they have so much poetry in them, with not a scrap of the usual historicising schlock. Not only does he pitch his battles in the historical no-man’s land of the seventh century, he finds the most exquisite sites to which to flip the reader—cities we have travelled but never understood, histories we can’t escape. And always his histories perversely exploit gaps in the record to go where angels fear to tread, knowing that history is stranger than we think or can prove: a Rome that has forgotten Caesar, a Constantinople that needs no Justinian-and-Theodora, an Alexandria more politically ferocious than anything under Mubarak. And as in so many of the great political thrillers, “history” is unpeeled like an onion as deception uncovers deception as the self-interest of Our Hero collides with the vaster yet meaner self-interests of the heroes of his time.
Jim Packer
WEA Librarian
