historical fiction with a revolutionary bent

[camouflage]

Not quite what you're after, but I'd recommend Adam Roberts' Salt has a good imagining of an anarchist society in the future...

So really completely the opposite of what you're after, but I reckon you'd enjoy it nonetheless...

Top recomend, and while we're at it, The Dispossesed, by Ursula LeGuin.

 

[Divisive Cotton]

Burning Paris by Nicholas Blincoe - about the Paris Commune

 

[Kizmet]

a revolutionary bent what?

 

[invisibleplanet]

Burning Paris by Nicholas Blincoe - about the Paris Commune

That's in my ''to read'' pile.

 

[marty21]

I'm reading 'Eye of the Red Tsar' Sam Eastland, at the moment - central figure is a Tsarist assassin/detective - imprisoned after the fall of the Tsar, now looking into the death of the Romanov family after being released from a prison camp by Comrade Stalin - hugely enjoyable historical novel.

 

[Mrs Magpie]

Winter In Madrid by C. J. Sansom is very readable, and fascinating historically. The winter in question is 1940, very soon after the Republicans were defeated.

Loved that book. C. J. Sanson writes really well.

 

[butchersapron]

Seven Red Sundays - Ramon J. Sender. Great Novel set amongst the insurrectionists in the years leading up to the Spanish Revolution - a mix of the Asturias Uprising and the declarations of libertarian communism that dotted the period.

And to whoever thieved my copy - you're an animal. Humans lend books.

 

[butchersapron]

I'm assuming the Traven novels have been mentioned?

 

[butchersapron]

Oh yes, Alfred Doblin (most famous for Berlin Alexanderplatz) wrote a very very long and not very good trilogy November 1918 set in the German revolution

 

[Santino]

a very very long and not very good trilogy

Sold!

 

[butchersapron]

Ops!

There's a reason it's so little knwn or read though...

 

[butchersapron]

Alos, a book which has been published as autobiography (including my The Socialist Party) but has actually been exposed as a a work of fiction - but still a very good read - Out of the Night by Jan Valtin (Richard Krebs). it was sort of the Q for the anti-communists of its day selling millions worldwide.

Jan Valtin came of age as a bicycle messenger during a Communist uprising on the German Baltic coast just after the end of World War I. His life is an intimate insider's account of the dramatic events of the 1920s and 1930s, where he rose both within the ranks of the Communist Party and on the Gestapo hit list. As eventual head of the Party's maritime organizing, he crossed Europe and the globe—professional revolutionary, agitator, spy, and assassin—including America, where a botched "hit" on Party orders landed him three years in San Quentin. Captured by the Gestapo, he endured years in a concentration camp, engineering his release by convincing his captors he could work as a double agent. Narrowly escaping the murderous clutches of Stalin's thugs, who brooked no deviation from the Party line, he eventually washed up in America, where he wrote this memoir—an unlikely bestseller that sold over a million copies in 1941

 

[Fedayn]

Still got a copy of Valtiins book. I've gotta say, fiction or not, it's a cracking read. Will dig it out again I think.

 

[imposs1904]

Oh yes, Alfred Doblin (most famous for Berlin Alexanderplatz) wrote a very very long and not very good trilogy November 1918 set in the German revolution

Don't tell us that. I just picked up one of the books for five bucks and was pleased as punch.

 

[butchersapron]

Don't tell us that. I just picked up one of the books for five bucks and was pleased as punch.

One mans opinion mate, one mans opinion

 

[Mrs Magpie]

It's not fiction, but The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James is excellent.

 

[camouflage]

It's not fiction, but The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James is excellent.

Yeah top book that, history gallops along through the Haitian revolution. Turns out it was all alot more complicated than I had assumed.

 

[rekil]

The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers was recommended to me. There's a 1944 film of it too. Also her 1932 novel Die Gefährten which was banned by the nazis, but it doesn't seem to be available anywhere.

 

[kropotkin]

not so much of a 'revolutionary' bent, but I can guarantee the OP will love the books of Alan Furst

http://alanfurst.net/main.htm

and a review of his latest

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-e...ies-of-the-balkans-by-alan-furst-2015870.html

Some other good recommendations in this thread. Whilst we're on a Luther Blisset/Wu Ming kick, their latest (well, latest translated into English) Manituana is predictibly great

You were right gawkroger-Spies of the Balkans was very good.

Thanks for all the replies everyone

 

[yield]

I read Floating Worlds by Cecelia Holland. The anarchists are really unappealing, almost anarcho capitalists.

Great read though. Highly recommended.

 

[contadino]

Caleb Carr's The Alienist is set against a backdrop of New York's gangs kicking off around the Five Points. Not a central theme, but good nonetheless.