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|sort=Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation Volume 1 The Pox Party

|title=The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation Volume 1 The Pox Party

|buy=Yes

|borrow=Yes

|pages=368

|publisher=Walker Books Ltd

|date=October 2007

|isbn=978-1844282111

}}

It's 1775, and Octavian is living a curiously privileged yet circumscribed life in Boston at the Novanglian College of Lucidity. Octavian and his mother reside with a group of rationalist scientists and philosophers. Octavian's mother is pampered and worshipped as a princess of African birth. The upper social echelons of Boston are full of men competing for her exotic attentions. Octavian is by turn pampered and disciplined. His lessons are demanding and the smallest failure is harshly punished. Yet he is dressed in silks and satins and educated by the finest minds of the day. He learns Latin and Greek and provides virtuoso performances on the violin. Everything he does is noted - right down to how much he eats. He is even required to defecate into a golden dish, so that his faeces might be weighed.

I absolutely loved ''Octavian Nothing'' and cannot recommend it highly enough, but with just one caveat - stylistically, it is extremely challenging. Anderson has used eighteenth century diction and syntax throughout and while this lifts what he has written from the good to the great, it also perhaps restricts ''Octavian Nothing'' to those prepared to make an effort. Reluctant readers need not apply.

Readers might also be interested in what life was like for black people in London just a few years after the Boston Tea Party setting of ''Octavian Nothing''. If so, they could do no better than to look out [[Jupiter Williams]] by S I Martin.

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