For our August competition we have five copies of our guest Marcus Sedgwick's latest book, Midwinterblood, to award to the writers of the five best answers to this question:
Have you ever learned a "truth" from reading a historical novel and if so what was it?
Answers by September 7th, please. Please write your entries in the Comments below.
All our competitions are limited to UK residents.
Reading Josephine Tey's 'Daughter of Time' as a teenager taught me that there's no such thing as absolute truth where the historical record's concerned. History is based as much on wishful thinking, gossip and hearsay as it is on actual hard facts.
ReplyDeleteA rather shocking but salutory lesson that I'm glad I learned sooner rather than later.
It was reading "Mists of Avalon" by Marion Zimmerman that brought me to paganism many decades ago & made me realise just how much of the "Old ways" the Christian church had stolen to convert the population. How hypocritical of them to now denounce pagan celebrations of those festivals as "ungodly".
ReplyDeleteI've learnt that people now, don't tresure their familys the way we should.
ReplyDeleteI first read The Way of the Wyrd by Brian Bates when I was in my early teens, it taught me that there is a lot that can be learned from other belief structures and cultures (this was important to me as I grew up in apartheid South Africa)
ReplyDeleteRuta Sepetys' Between Shades of Gray presented a more personal and detailed account of the Soviet's gulag prison system compared to what I was taught in high school history. It reminded me that I'm never too old to learn something and that there is usually far more sides to a story than we can count.
ReplyDelete