Alan Judd
The reissue by McBooks Press (Amazon, £7.43) of John Biggins's Otto Prohaska tetralogy, beginning with A Sailor of Austria, is more than welcome. Set in the AustroHungarian empire's submarine service (sic) during the first world war, it evokes that impossible empire so convincingly that it is hard to believe that the author wasn't there (he wasn't). Reversing customary chronology, the three successor volumes recount Prohaska's earlier wartime and pre-war adventures with equal authority and with the same wry erudition. This engagingly affectionate but critical recreation of a world almost as remote — but just as plausible — as Patrick O'Brian's Nelsonian navy deserves wider recognition.
John Preston's The Dig (Viking, £16.99) is a sensitive and beautifully written evocation of the finding of the Sutton Hoo Saxon treasure in Suffolk in 1939. Elegiac in tone, it tells the story through the eyes of the principals, their shared passion for the past driven in part by growing awareness of their imminent future during that final peacetime summer.
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