Name: Pompeii
Rating: 3.82 (25 reviews)

Robert Etienne

An expert on Pompeii uses photographs, reconstructed city plans, mosaics, and drawings to provide a vivid portrait of life in this Roman city

The Day a City Died

Pompeii

Robert Harris

A Novel

Tim Pendry

This really is rather good although it loses a star for perhaps fiddling the reality of the effects of a pyroclastic flow in order to come out with a crowd-pleasing result that really should not have been allowed. However, this is a small quibble. What we have here is a startlingly good evocation of the Roman Empire in the Bay of Naples in the first century AD - so good and so well researched that it would do no harm to have it on the syllabus of anyone studying the classics (if anyone does nowadays) at secondary school. It is also a solid thriller but the skill lies in the almost cinematic writing and clarity of style, the sign of an educated man trained as a journalist and abandoning any attempt to be self-consciously literary for a market of introverts. This is excellent writing for the educated element in the masses as we might have expected a hundred years ago from the likes of Rider Haggard or Conan Doyle. The set piece of the Roman fleet under a rain of pumice is a tour de force of imagination and tight writing. The characterisation is superb as well. He pulls off the difficult trick of presenting us with real human beings who do not know anything outside their era and who share the assumptions of that era but who have all the emotions that we might have. With only one romantic lapse, these are people who accept the social conditions of their era much as we do ours. There is no didacticism or moralising from a twenty-first century perspective - a rare pleasure nowadays. Harris imagines what it must have been like to be Roman brilliantly. Harris seems to specialise in fine popular writing set in history without allowing his stories to slip into the standard tropes of the historical novel. Most of his story-telling is set in the twentieth century and he has no problem with alternative history - most famously in 'Fatherland'. To have moved from territory he clearly knows well back in time two thousand years and come up with this book shows more than just the novelist and the journalist - it shows an author who could also have been, had he chosen, a very fine historian. A very good read.

Little known fact about me… I am mildly obsessed with Pompeii. 

Did the audiobook too because it was Steve Pacy. Everything i like in one place. My review it skewed deeply by personal bias. I loved it with my whole nerd heart. Please historical fiction authors… more Pompeii POV books!

Apiecalypse Jen

Little known fact about me… I am mildly obsessed with Pompeii. 

Did the audiobook too because it was Steve Pacy. Everything i like in one place. My review it skewed deeply by personal bias. I loved it with my whole nerd heart. Please historical fiction authors… more Pompeii POV books!

A number one bestselling Roman thriller from the award-winning master of the literary and historical thriller genre: Robert Harris. A thrilling depiction of one of the most famous natural disasters in human history: the explosion of Mount Vesuvius. A sweltering week in late August. Where better to enjoy the last days of summer than on the beautiful Bay of Naples? But even as Rome's richest citizens relax in their villas around Pompeii and Herculaneum, there are ominous warnings that something is going wrong. Wells and springs are failing, a man has disappeared, and now the greatest aqueduct in the world - the mighty Aqua Augusta - has suddenly ceased to flow. Through the eyes of four characters - a young engineer, an adolescent girl, a corrupt millionaire and an elderly scientist - Robert Harris brilliantly recreates a luxurious world on the brink of destruction.

Pompeii The Day a City Died

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