Ten top neo-Victorian novels

Charles Palliser's books include The Quincunx, The Unburied, and Rustication. One of his top ten neo-Victorian novels--books that "don’t merely use the 19th-century setting but exploit readers’ knowledge of the fiction of that period"--as shared at the Guardian:

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

Forget about the movie. This is a masterpiece and could only work as a novel. It’s the Homeric story of a soldier trying to return to his wife and home after fighting in a war – here the American Civil War. And it’s also a moving love story which ends heartbreakingly. Like The Odyssey, it’s a series of episodes that would normally fragment a novel’s unity but each one is so powerful and mysterious and so much in tune with the dominant theme that it succeeds completely. A book that will resonate in the memory.

Read about another entry on the list.

Cold Mountain also appears on Henry Winkler's best books list and Tunku Varadarajan's five best list of the most delectable combinations of fiction and food.

--Marshal Zeringue