Birth Of A Nation: A Novel - Hardcover

Tremendous fun, as Julian Rathbone plays fast and loose with great swathes of American history . . . He wears his learning lightly and has a disarmingly flippant side. BIRTH OF A NATION is notable for the sheer breadth of the material it contains. The narrative meanders, but to excellent purpose, as Rathbone finds a succession of contrasting milieus, all superbly described, for his itinerant hero . . . the novel can be recommended without reservation. It has all the ingredients -- a likeable hero, a string of feisty heroines, well-drawn locales, dramatic reversals of fortune -- of the classic English adventure story (SUNDAY TELEGRAPH)

Julian Rathbone has always set subversively right the things most popular fiction is content to leave wrong. His thrillers are in the fine tradition of Eric Ambler: radical critiques of the way things are, and of the way most thrillers accept that status (INDEPENDENT)

If history, as Marx suggested, repeats itself first as tragedy and next as farce, then Charlie's rollicking version of it is firmly in the second camp (FINANCIAL TIMES)

Clever stuff this. Rathbone writes well, has a vast knowledge of his subject, and is witty (HERALD)

* A heady cocktail of fact and fiction this is a hilarious exploration of the lacunae in official histories, demonstarting that it's the fittest who survive -- but the fittest are not necessarily the biggest and strongest. The sequel to the hugely successful A VERY ENGLISH AGENT