10 books like The Long Ships

Another book by Bernard Cornwell, and this one is a bit of cheat as it's set more in Dark Age Britain than the Viking Age, but the Saxons antagonists are painted as Vikings of a fashion.

This is a version of the Arthurian legends. It is the first of the Warlord Chronicles, followed by Enemy of God, and Excalibur. I was blown away by this book when I first read it, the description of the period feels so authentic and is totally different to any other novel about Arthur. The characterization of Merlin and Nimue are stunning, as are the battles.

The series is a tragic tale of the downfall of the Britons so shot through with sadness that it brought a tear to my eye...

This amazing novel gets right inside the mind of Hadrian, a great emperor who ruled wisely over Rome’s Golden Age. In public, a statesman and soldier, in private he was thoughtful, cultured, and philosophical. He tells us much about his life, and about the empire he ruled. He is both credulous and sceptical, indifferent to and curious about pleasure, both eager and reluctant to rule. He muses about power, war, the arts, love, friendship, and much else. Perhaps the most moving episode is Hadrian’s grief at the death of Antinous, his beautiful young boyfriend, who he later deified.  

This memoir, in contemplative, narrative form, is utterly believable, and reminds us that the inner life is as important, and as interesting, as events and actions.

For writers of historical fiction, Eagle in the Snow has attained almost mythical status. First published fifty years ago, the book is still in print mainly through the enthusiastic recommendation of readers. Wallace Breem wrote only two other works and died in 1990, so there will be nothing more from his pen. It adds piquancy to the themes of the story: it’s a tale of the passing of things and the dying of an empire. It’s the tale of a man struggling against the fading of the light, even though he knows the struggle is hopeless. It’s a story of endings in a world that does not understand its mortality.

The short reign of Julian the Apostate is one of the “what ifs” of history. Raised as a Christian, Julian was a secret pagan. When he unexpectedly became emperor, he reversed the privileges of the Church and promoted his own Neo-Platonist cult, intending to restore paganism. Even though we know how things really turned out, it is fascinating to speculate about what might have happened if he had succeeded. 

Gore Vidal has filled this novel with war, politics, sex, religion, heresy, and philosophy. I have tried to follow his example (though I have been more sympathetic to eunuchs than he was).

Mixtli, an elderly Aztec lord captured by the Spanish, is reluctantly questioned by a Catholic bishop charged with reporting to the king of Spain about the customs and mores of his new unwilling subjects. The bishop is repulsed and appalled by the violent history and, to his mind, sexual looseness of the Aztecs while blind to the violent depredations of the conquistadors who protect him. But the story that outrages the bishop is for the reader a spectacular tragic saga of the end of the Aztec empire from the point of view of the conquered and a telling of what was lost.

The book is told from the goddess Circe’s point of view, beginning with her childhood among the Titans until she is banished to her island where she becomes a powerful oracle, enchantress, herbalist, and feminist with magic powers to seduce men.

Her narrative is at once enthralling because Circe, being a goddess who lives for over a thousand years, experiences the heroes from the Trojan War, the demi-gods of Greece, and the adventures of her lovers and her own self-discoveries that mark her journey through the ages.

On a personal note, Circe’s journey hits home with anyone, like myself, who has struggled with becoming an independent woman.

Ever wonder how in the world Hannibal got elephants across the alps? Ross Leckie’s violent and graphic account answers that question and more as it plunges the reader into the mind of the Carthaginian general driven to avenge his father’s defeat and this country’s humiliation in the first Punic War. The book revels in the fascinating details of ancient military campaigns and battle tactics. It’s a blood-drenched fever-dream of a novel that’s not for the squeamish, but a compulsive read for the rest of us.

The Roman poet Ovid was one of the most popular writers of his day, but the defining tragedy of his life – his lifelong exile from Rome at the very height of his powers – remains as mysterious today as it was in his own time. In The Love-Artist, Jane Alison provides that tragedy with a back story, when Ovid, on holiday on the shores of the Black Sea, meets and is enchanted by the witch-like Xenia and persuades her to return with him to Rome, with dire consequences. But it’s the book’s dream-like atmosphere – the sense that we are seeing the world through the eyes of a great poet with one foot in the ambitious world of empire and the other in an unstable netherworld of imagination and mythology – that will remain with the reader.

Written long before quarantines became so fashionable, Jesus in Jim Crace’s novel is an almost peripheral player, because– set during Christ’s forty days in the wilderness – six other people share in the inhospitable desert caves, miracles, and hallucinations. Each character has their own troubles and trials; their own battles with demons to resolve; which they hope isolation and fasting will accomplish. And for each, in ingenious ways, it does… I am a big fan of Crace’s style, rhythm, and invention, and this is one of his finest works.

Alfred Duggan is one of those authors I stumbled across by accident (a random discovery at my local library) a man whose books I immediately started collecting once I’d finished his first. His novels are impeccably researched and he’s one of the few authors I know who seem to slip effortlessly into the minds of their characters, offering an authentic viewpoint of their world through their eyes. This novel is set in the dying days of Roman Britain and uses what few historical details are known of the period to give us a completely credible tale of the ‘little emperors’ of the Romano-British administration as they attempt to cling to power after the departure of the last legions to the Continent.