Book Reviews

River Kings, written by bioarchaeologist Cat Jarman (who is also a field archaeologist specialising in the Viking Period) takes a small carnelian bead found in the site of Repton and follows what may have been its journey through the Viking...

Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century is a collection of articles regarding Ottoman cultural history presented at a conference at Princeton University in 2005. As the title suggests, the book claims...

Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold by Stephen Fry is his first book in his Greek Mythology series. Stephen Fry has compiled the core myths from Greek mythology, beginning with the cosmogony or creation of the universe with the protogenoi or primordial...

Queens of Jerusalem: The Women Who Dared To Rule by Katherine Pangonis is a non-fiction book focussed on the lives of the royal women who ruled in the medieval Middle East (or Outremer) from 1099 to Saladin's conquest of Jerusalem in 1187...

Lore Olympus is a graphic novel that was initially published on Webtoon and is now being published in physical format. Volume One only includes episodes 1-25 but Rachel is continuously uploading new episodes online. Lore Olympus is a contemporary...

Egyptian Mythology: A Travelers Guide from Aswan to Alexandria by Egyptologist Garry J. Shaw takes you on a journey up the Nile as if on a tour of Egypt's most historically rich and important sites. This tour up the Nile transports you to...

How the Greeks Built Cities by R. E. Wycherley is a concise text examining the relationship between an ancient city’s structure and its residents. Wycherley composes a recipe for an ancient Greek town, and each chapter covers a different...

The Wolf Den is a novel by Elodie Harper which is set in Pompeii in the 1st century CE in Pompeii’s lupanar which is the brothel of the ancient city. The term lupanar could mean both brothel or wolf den, and the term lupa could be used for...

Ariadne by Jennifer Saint follows the myth of the Minotaur in the Labyrinth, and Theseus' subsequent desertion of Ariadne on Naxos, from the point of view of Ariadne and her younger sister Phaedra. The first thing that struck me when reading...

The Porpoise is a novel that seamlessly intertwines a modern tale with an ancient story. After Philipe’s wife is killed in a plane crash and their daughter Angelica survives, the wealthy father raises his daughter in near isolation. Although...