I was immediately struck by the cover with its picture of the burning tower. I think I would’ve read it just on the cover alone. There’s something stark and unsettling about it, apart from the obvious ruin and destruction.
Hav is actually two books: The Last Letters from Hav (1985) and Hav of the Myrmidons (2005). It’s a travelogue of a fictional country that was so compelling when it was published that people wrote the author asking her how to get there. It reminds me very much of one of my favorite books, Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, about her travels in the Balkans between the two World Wars. Hav is filled with people washed up from other places, settled into a kind of aimless mishmash of languages and cultures. The sequel paints a picture of a world that I think we all might recognize in how much has changed in what we’ve lost and gained.
It’s a slow, quiet, meditative book and I was happy to have found it.