The following review was contributed by: John Walsh: CLICK TO VIEW John Walsh's Reviews

In the world of the ancient Mediterranean, the trader and doctor Daneion travels different lands in search of food for the starving people of Athens and in search of his own dynasty. A confidant of Queen Olympias of Macedonia and, briefly, her lover, it is possible that he may have fathered the child that she is to bear. That child will of course be Alexander, who in turn is destined to conquer most of the known world and establish an empire that would stretch from Egypt to the borders of India. In Traces, the second of a series of books concerning the years around the birth of Alexander, Faye Turner has created an interesting set of characters who interact with each other and the world in believable and enjoyable ways. In clear prose, she outlines her story well and the book has a pleasingly page-turning impetus to it.

There have been many attempts at recreating the life and times of Alexander the Great. Perhaps the best of these are those by Mary Renault, Fire from Heaven, The Persian Boy and Funeral Games. Renault’s work is superior historical fiction in that it combines believable and compelling historical detail with an approach to the text that makes an effort to engage with the literary tropes and forms that are as contemporaneous as possible, while remaining nevertheless easily comprehensible to the modern reader. Faye Turner does not quite approach these high standards for a variety of reasons. There seems to be a number of anachronisms in the text, despite the obvious research that she has conducted to make her book believable. This detracts from the sense of time and place which are vital to maintaining the suspension of disbelief that is vital for sustaining a series of books of the historical fiction genre. These include the use of ‘boxes’ when amphorae would more likely have been used, as well as the ways in which characters behave. However, many readers will not be concerned about what they might characterise as pedantry. Nevertheless, there is a sense that the characters are the only people in the world and that, if they do not do something, then it will not get done. The economic, military and political realities of the past, which kept seemingly remote communities linked together through complex networks of relations and mutually important obligations and dues. Again, this could be ignored by readers who would prefer to concentrate on the story and forget about all that, possibly uninteresting, background material.

This is a nicely done piece of historical fiction and slips down like a glass of retsina.