The Empress of the Last Days: A Novel - Couverture rigide

Stevenson, Jane

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0618149147 ISBN 13 : 9780618149148

Editeur : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004

Synopsis

Book by Stevenson Jane

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

This is a novel of many pleasures: a passionate and tender interracial love story that is also an fascinating scholarly detective tale. A young Oxford don named Michael Foxwist and a group of his academic friends come upon a collection of dusty old documents; they are intrigued to learn of the clandestine seventeenth-century marriage of the black prince, Pelagius, and Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia. With mounting excitement, they discover that the true queen of England may not be the familiarly dowdy elderly woman of German extraction but a young and gifted black scientist of independent mind. She lives in Barbados and is the last living descendant of Elizabeth and Pelagius. Michael confronts her with her heritage only to find that she refuses to be the child of destiny and insists on being herself. But their meeting changes everything -- they fall in love. Of different race, nationality, and temperament, they must reexamine all their assumptions and the terms on which they live.
Though written to be read independently, The Empress of the Last Days is also the triumphant conclusion to Jane Stevenson's acclaimed historical trilogy, companion to The Winter Queen and The Shadow King. Often compared to such writers as Penelope Fitzgerald and A. S. Byatt, Stevenson once again gives us a splendid work of rich imagination, lively erudition, warm humanity, and wit.

Revue de presse

"Spectacular talent...great intellectual sharpness... [This] is a profoundly satisfying end to a magnificent sequence" (Guardian)

"Jane Stevenson's touch is so light, her learning so deep and wide, that you enter another country which, while foreign, soon feels as familiar as your own" (Daily Telegraph)

"The Empress of the Last Days is a detective story and an account of 'a game of snakes and ladders for young academics', but it is also a novel of ideas...it's refreshing to read an accessible fiction that races at serious themes with its horns lowered" (Observer)

"Stevenson deftly strikes a balance between lush romanticism and cool contemporary realism" (Sunday Times)

"Stevenson is excellent at historical detail and on relationships in history...she has whetted our appetite for more delicious tastes from the past" (Scotsman)

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Date d'édition: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0618149147
• ISBN 13: 9780618149148
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 368