Ah, I have not yet browsed the place to found a proper thread and as Equitius posted in here... let it be.
I´ve heard about The Ptolemies book, according to the amazon rewiewer - I know the guy - it had funny things like tomatoes in it. Otherwise quite ok, I hear. Its so difficult to sort all the different Ptolemies when reading a history book...
Mary Renault is perhaps the best author ever to write novels about the classical world. When I was a "Late Republic nut" I savoured McCullough because of her detailed narrative... but now I´ve come to dislike the type of books generally called "historical fiction". Books that are not worth reading by themselves and are read by people interested about history. Life´s simply too short to read crap.
Renault has been able to create the world of classical Greece, her books read as LITERATURE and CLASSICS, not "historical fiction. I have read The Praise Singer, a memoir of the poet Simonides, and am reading the Fire from Heaven. This book is the first of three dealing with Alexander, with them her best known novel is her Last of the Wine, of the heyday and fall of Athens.
I knew Piscine - does the vocative make the Latin inquisition happy
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- doesn´t like fiction in general... but a good book is a good book.