Cleopatra [Kindle Edition]

The other reviewer did a great job. I agree totally. Normally I would not be attracted to another story about Cleopatra, but I love Haggard's novels, his writing style, character development. I bought this for my Kindle and was surprised at the wonder, complex, multi-dimensional story. Hard to put down. Characters come alive and you experience the mysteries of ancient Egypt. Haggard is a first class writer. Tolkein read Haggard as a boy. This is one I will re-read from time to time. No longer copywrited, I got it for 99 cents for my Kindle.

This is the epic story of the pharaoh who never was. The story of Harmachis and Cleopatra is vivid and intense, and involves love gone wrong in so many ways.

With the exception of a short prologue, the entire book is given as a translation of three ancient scrolls. Here's a sentence, to give you an idea of the style: "Then in life mayst thou be wretched, and after death may Osiris refuse thee, and the judges of Amenti give judgment against thee, and Set and Sekhet torment thee, till such time as thy sin is purged and the Gods of Egypt, called by strange names, are once more worshipped in the Temples of Egypt, and the Staff of the Oppressor is broken, and the footsteps of the Foreigner are swept clean, and the thing is accomplished as thou in thy weakness shalt cause it to be done." It gives the story a certain Biblical weightiness, and isn't as intrusive as it might seem, but be prepared. That aside, it's a great character study of strong personalities against a violent historical backdrop.

5* for the Book, 1* for the version from General Books LLC

Love H Rider Haggard's books, and Cleopatra has to be his best "little known" novel (as compared say to the better known ones such as "King Solomons Mines". Other reviewers have done a great job describing the novel, I'm not going to rehash, I agree.

However, if you are interested in buying this, be aware that the book is now out in the public domain and a plethora of reprints are available, mostly from Print on Demand Publishers reprinting copyright-expired books. And, believe me, there's some truely awful reprints available. Some of these publishers produce quite good quality books, some do not. What you do need to do is check the publisher carefully for all these older "copyright expired" books. An outstanding example of "not good quality" is the reprint published by General Books LLC. This version is scanned in using OCR technology (and using pretty poor quality OCR scanning equipment and software from the look of their books), is overall of very poor print quality, uses automated reproduction with no index, no illustrations and an excessive number of typos.

To quote some specifics from the publisher's own web site:
"We created your book using OCR software that includes an automated spell check. Our OCR software is 99 percent accurate if the book is in good condition. However, with up to 3,500 characters per page, even one percent can be an annoying number of typos...."

"After we re-typeset and designed your book, the page numbers change so the old index and table of contents no longer work. Therefore, we usually remove them. Since many of our books only sell a couple of copies, manually creating a new index and table of contents could add more than a hundred dollars to the cover price...."

"Our OCR software can't distinguish between an illustration and a smudge or library stamp so it ignores everything except type. We would really like to manually scan and add the illustrations. But many of our books only sell a couple of copies...."

"We created your book using a robot who turned and photographed each page. Our robot is 99 percent accurate. But sometimes two pages stick together. And sometimes a page may even be missing from our copy of the book. We would really like to manually scan each page and buy multiple copies of each original. But many of our books only sell a couple of copies....."

General Books LLC are flooding Amazon with these low quality publications (450,000+ listed so far) and, unfortunately, many of them have the reviews associated with the original or with better quality imprints associated with them. For the buyer that's not aware of this publisher this can result in a rather unfortunate purchasing decision.

A good rule of thumb for these Print on Demand publishers is to take a look at the cover - if it's a good quality illustration that reflects the content, there's a table of contents, and when you do the Look Inside thing there's no disclaimer saying you're looking at another book, and they've stated that they used facsimile reproduction technology (rather than OCR), it's usually a pretty safe bet. Conversely, if any of these are missing, you're taking a chance on the quality. I've bought a few based on my selection criteria above and they've been good quality. General Books LLC however, is a publisher to steer clear of at all costs.

If you have been unfortunate enough to buy the General Books LLC version by mistake, you can return to Amazon for a full refund (but check Amazon's return policy and process first).