@vivdunstan : Thanks for sharing! I’m definitely going to look for Echolands. Boudikaa is a very intriguing personality.
I read two novels set in and around early 20th century New York:
New Rochelle, New York, in the United States of America.
The beginning of the 20th century.
A time of progress.
Flying machines, telephones, electric trams, skyscrapers, land of hope and Houdini.
Racism, poverty, child labour, snorting and stomping and chestpounding capitalism.
They were ragged times. Scott Joplin wrote the music.
Ragtime, by E. L. Doctorow.
There is a short and funny sequence in Ragtime describing Sigmund Freud’s visit to the USA. This reminded me of another novel that was somewhere in my stack of unread books: The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld.
Coinciding with Dr Freud’s visit to New York, where he will be staying to give his Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis at Clark University, a gruesome murder is committed. A day later, a young woman is attacked in the same manner as the murder victim. She survives, but has lost all recollection of the event. Dr Stratham Younger, an American devotee of Freud’s who is acting as the great Doctor’s guide in New York, takes it upon himself to help the young woman regain her memory through analysis.
Very clever mystery novel. A great sense of early 20th century New York, a good deal of (fictionalised but true in spirit) conflict between Freud and Jung, and a psychoanalytic perspective on Shakespeare’s Hamlet as an ongoing motif throughout the book.
-Freud: Five Lectures on Psych-Analysis (Internet Archive link)
-The Interpretation of Murder (Jed Rubenfeld) - Wikipedia