Saxon Stories #2
HarperCollins
January 2006
On Sale: January 1, 2006
Featuring: Uhtred, Lord of Bebbanburg; Alfred
368 pages ISBN: 0060787120 EAN: 9780060787127 Kindle: B000N2HCW4 Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
Uhtred is a Saxon, cheated of his inheritance and adrift
in a world of fire, sword, and treachery. He has to make a
choice: whether to fight for the Vikings, who raised him, or
for King Alfred the Great of Wessex, who dislikes
him.
In the late ninth century, Wessex is the last
English kingdom. The rest have fallen to the Danish Vikings,
a story told in The Last Kingdom, the New York
Times bestselling novel in which Uhtred's tale began.
Now the Vikings want to finish England. They assemble the
Great Army, whose one ambition is to conquer Wessex. A
dispossessed young nobleman, married to a woman who hails
from Wessex, Uhtred has little love for either, though for
King Alfred he has none at all. Yet fate, as Uhtred learns,
has its own imperatives, and when the Vikings attack out of
a wintry darkness to shatter the last English kingdom,
Uhtred finds himself at Alfred's side.
Bernard
Cornwell's The Pale Horseman, like The Last
Kingdom, is rooted in the real history of Anglo-Saxon
England. It tells the astonishing and true story of how
Alfred, forced to become a fugitive in a few square miles of
swampland, fights his enemies against overwhelming odds. The
king is a pious Christian, while Uhtred is a pagan. Alfred
is a sickly scholar, while Uhtred is an arrogant warrior.
Yet the two forge an uneasy alliance that will lead them out
of the marshes to the stark hilltop where the last remaining
Saxon army will fight for the very existence of
England.
Enthralling as both a historical and personal
story, The Pale Horseman is a novel of divided
loyalties and desperate heroism, featuring a cast of fully
realized characters, from a king in despair to a beguiling
British sorceress. And always, beyond the spearmen and the
swordsmen are the folk who suffer as the tides of war sweep
over their farmlands. From Bernard Cornwell, the New
York Times bestselling author whom the Washington
Post calls "perhaps the greatest writer of historical
adventure novels today," The Pale Horseman is yet
another masterpiece of historical and battle fiction that
gives life to one of the most important and exciting epochs
in the history of the English people and culture.