In this installment of The Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice
summons up dazzling worlds to bring us the story of
Armand -- eternally young, with the face of a Botticelli
angel. We travel with Armand across the centuries to the
Kiev Rus of his boyhood -- a ruined city under Mongol
dominion -- and to ancient Constantinople, where Tartar
raiders sell him into slavery. And in a magnificent
palazzo in the Venice of the Renaissance we see him
emotionally and intellectually in thrall to the great
vampire Marius, who masquerades among humankind as a
mysterious, reclusive painter and who will bestow upon
Armand the gift of vampiric blood.
As the novel races to its climax, moving through scenes of
luxury and elegance, of ambush, fire, and devil worship,
to nineteenth-century Paris and today's New Orleans, we
see its eternally vulnerable and romantic hero forced to
choose between his twilight immortality and the salvation
of his immortal soul.