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Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-century London – Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2023

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As their lives begin to intertwine—in markets and underground clubs, in churches and hotel rooms—the vagabonds are seized and challenged by the spirits who command the city. Additionally make sure your User-Agent is not empty and is something unique and descriptive and try again. Listening to him, Thomas could feel both the danger and the promise of the world in full, and it thrilled him to the bone.

A vigorous and necessary account made timely by the widening chasm between obscene wealth and dire poverty in our contemporary metropolis. We are left with the sense that despite poverty, monotony and grinding hard work, these people’s human spirit, optimism and humour helped them triumph over their surroundings. His latest book, Vagabonds, uses a series of case studies to show us what it was like to be on the street in the eighteenth and nineteenth. Sickly fifteen year old Prince Psal, the son of the nature-blessed warrior-king Nahas, should have been named Crown Prince of all Wheel Clan lands.I started my vagabond life on the Appalachian Trail a decade before Derick did, but I found myself laughing in commiseration with his escapades as he learned what it means to walk across the country.

One of the best history books I have read recently' The Historical Novel Society You may also be interested in. Inspired by Jack Kerouac's adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Relatedly I would have liked more about queerness in general, and more exploration of the topic of gender roles as well. His latest book is Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century London (Duckworth, 2022), and his first detective novel will appear with Viper in January 2024.Jensen doesn't just present these hitherto marginalised figures on the page; like a delightful sorcerer, he brings them back to life. When I first laid eyes on this mid-Victorian masterpiece at Royal Holloway University, I was captivated by image of poor Londoners, lining up outside a police station on a dark and snowy night, in the hope of receiving a ticket that would allow them admission to a casual ward – temporary accommodation granted on a nightly basis. Hyenas sounded the way they did because they were found gossiping among themselves during a meeting in heaven which ended with God turning to them and saying in a bitter voice: Oh, you want to laugh? This poetry makes it easy for the author to talk about the city’s ills — crime, corruption, domestic violence, bloodshed — while keeping it light. Eko, the spirit of Lagos, and his loyal minion Tatafo weave trouble through the streets of Lagos and through the lives of the ‘vagabonds’ powering modern Nigeria: the queer, the displaced and the footloose.

Perhaps the only common ground between the similarly titled but very different books is that they were both written for people who wander, who find home in those they meet along on the way. In fairness, though, the author says that there is not much authoritative information about these people. Osunde’s magnificent magical realist debut crafts a mosaic of struggle and pain in Lagos held together by Tatafo, a supernatural choruslike figure who does the bidding of “cityspirit” Eko. Most Nigerians remember this match, whether they were born at the time or not; know the story like they know God-with a fervent, fastidious faith.Readers will witness a dance of seduction between two beautiful women who eschew the gazes of men, and they'll recoil from the violent end to the burgeoning love between Johnny and Livinus.

Each character, from a spectral godlike spirit to a transgender maid to a group of abused wives, all rise above their oppression to emerge transcended and ethereally beautiful. is also a time capsule, as Eloghosa’s use of casual pidgin and cultural references like Odunsi (The Engine) and Netflix often feel like a deliberate attempt to capture the zeitgeist.I can't wait for others to delve into the joyous, defiant world she has rendered for her debut novel, Vagabonds. I was initially surprised that it didn't really have much int he way of a conclusion, but that is kind of the point.

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