The latest addition to my website is Susan Daitch‘s The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir. Daitch wrote two excellent post-modern novels in 1986 and 1990. Since then, she has written only one novel, till the appearance of this one, a wonderful, long and complicated post-modern take-off of the Indiana Jones/lost city novel. The novel is initially narrated by Ariel Bokser, whose father had been a mineralogist in Iran and who had obtained the notebook of a Russian émigré, indicating the existence of a lost city in the Iranian desert. We follow not only the adventures of Bokser as he tries to find the city but also of the Russian woman and her husband and their predecessors, two Englishmen. Mysterious deaths and disappearances, dubious identities, escapes from moving police cars, Soviet spies, bumbling English officials, the Shah’s secret police, the Ayatollah’s secret police, ships sunk by the Nazis, scrolls in strange languages and pots, statuary and so on are all part and parcel of Daitch’s action-packed but definitely post-modernist tale. It is a great read, the action never lets up and just as you think you know who is who and what they are up to, things change, generally not for the better.