C. P. Lesley's 3 favorite reads in 2024

• 2023
• 2024

Andrea Penrose is well known for her Regency-era historical mysteries, but this fictional biography is a departure for her. The titular Diamond is Lady Hester Stanhope, tagged even today with adjectives such as “notorious” and “eccentric” for her adventures as an archaeologist in the Middle East. The novel focuses on her life before she abandons England, revealing the factors that led to her decision. It opens with Lady Hester fleeing her country estate for London, where she already has a reputation as outspoken, passionate, and “different.” Although at twenty-four, she is regarded as almost too old to wed, her ties to the politically powerful Pitt family mean that she is still a “catch” for men of ambition.

Lady Hester wants none of it. She’d rather dress in men’s clothes and ride hell-for-leather across the moors. And so the stage is set for what will become, over the course of the book, a spectacular and wholly unconventional life. What I love most is the portrayal of Hester herself: intelligent, daring, at times annoying hard-headed, but always responsive to reason and with her heart in the right place.

As anyone who has read my novels knows, I am fascinated by nomadic life on the Eurasian steppe, especially the role of women in that society. So I am always on the alert for fiction—and even nonfiction, as my next pick will show—set in the grasslands that run from China to the Black Sea. Vast but scarcely populated, subject to extremes of climate, inhospitable to agriculture but perfect for maintaining large herds of grazing animals, the steppes gave rise to a warrior culture based on archery and horses that maintained itself almost unchanged into the 19th century, when modern weaponry imperiled the ancient ways.

Lindbergh’s novel traces the life and career of a leader among the Sauromatae, a people who may have given rise to the myth of the Amazons, recorded by the Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century BCE. We meet her heroine, Akmaral, in her final hours, when she is reminiscing about the events that brought her to her present state—queen of a united people forged from what she calls “a disparate multitude of wandering herders.” The rest of the book shows us how she attained that state in vivid detail. It’s a winner in every sense.

This nonfiction study of the millenial-long relationship between humans and horses is absolutely fascinating. Focused on the Eurasian steppe, the natural habitat of horses throughout most of history—and there lies its relevance to my own interests, as noted in my second pick of the year—the book also dives into Chinese and Iranian and Indian relationships with horses, tracing their domestication; changes in saddles, bridles, and other types of horse tack; breeding and the types of training used in various parts of the world; and even the mythology associated with horses.

But that's just the beginning. Until the development of steam and internal combustion engines, horses provided the main means of transportation, and their needs determined where empires could expand and how. Genghis Khan's massive army traveled with at least a million horses, all of whom required pasture and water and places to rest. Chaffetz shows how those needs drove decisions about where to fight and with whom; even among the Mongols, commanders who ignored the needs of their horses suffered defeat in battle, and he shows how the need to pasture the horses ultimately placed limits on Genghis’s conquests.

It's all delivered in an engaging prose visible from the first page. I expected to read about three chapters focused on the time periods I write about, but I ended up covering the book from beginning to end. And if you ever need to know just how fast an experienced rider can get from Karakorum to Tabriz or how far a cavalry unit can travel in a day, this book will tell you.