Large-scale action scenes are notoriously hard to write and Obioma’s skills sometimes fall short of his ambitions. Conversely, his descriptions of the "terrible beauty of the freshly dead" in the aftermath of battle are compelling ... At other times the writing is uneven and would have benefited from more assiduous editing ... The Road to the Country is a literary quest, the hope being that fictional invention will be more convincing than any history book, a vital part of the attempt to keep the past as living memory. In this, Obioma has succeeded masterfully.
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