Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. The protagonist is a deserter from the Confederate armies, trying to make his way back home to the woman he hopes to marry. It’s bleak, but also inspiring.

I’m also continuing to reread the many works of Anthony Trollope. He’s my kind of writer, a craftsman rather than an artist. He claimed to turn out 2500 words before breakfast, and to regularly write at a rate of 250 words per quarter-hour. I suspect this is gilding the lily a bit . Even if he didn’t spend hours agonising over le mot juste, this pace would imply that he knew exactly what he was going to write when he started, allowing no time even for rearranging sentences. Nevertheless, with 47 3-volume novels to his credit, he must have averaged around 1000 words of final output every working day. I read somewhere that George Orwell wrote nearly 200 000 words in a single year. He would have been using a typewriter, as opposed to Trollope’s pen and ink. Of course, the romantics despise this kind of thing, but my view is that the more you write, the more good stuff you write.