Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Nothing prepared me for the complexity, depth and shear sense of reality that Colleen McCullogh's The First Man in Rome provided. I have read a lot of historical fiction and was used to authors routinely ignoring the real nitty gritty of daily life in previous ages in order to get on with their story. McCollogh manages to infuse a lively plot with a significant amount of period lore, domestic detail and even hitorical exposition without ever losing the reader's interest. Her characters and their story - taken straight from history - manage to be both larger than life and believably human at the same time. Among the devices she uses to achieve a kind of verisimilitude are imagined conversations, letters, and maps (drawn by her own hand). Where there are unknowns in the historical record, her inventions are based on careful research and are, if not correct, certainly plausible. I can't praise this book (and the four that follow it in the series) highly enough. Standing in the remains of the original forum in Rome last year, I felt as if I had actually experienced that place before. So much of the story told in these books takes place in the limited confines of the forum and the nearby Palitine and Capitoline hills, and her description of the space was so accurate - even with the passage of two thousand years - that it was easy to imagine how it must have looked then. Anyone who loves historical fiction - that is, real history presented in novel form - owes it to themselves to experience this book. It is both a work of scholarship and a great imaginative achievement written by a master of language. No story totally invented could be half as interesting as this tale of real people that McCollough brings to life in these pages. A great book.