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Book Reviewed by:From New York Times bestselling Conn Iggulden comes a new novel set in the red-blooded days of Anglo-Saxon England. This is the original game for the English throne.
In the year 937, the new king of England, a grandson of Alfred the Great, readies himself to go to war in the north. His dream of a united kingdom of all England will stand or fall on one field - on the passage of a single day.
At his side is the priest Dunstan of Glastonbury, full of ambition and wit (perhaps enough to damn his soul). His talents will take him from the villages of Wessex to the royal court, to the hills of Rome - from exile to exaltation. Through Dunstan's vision, by his guiding hand, England will either come together as one great country or fall back into anarchy and misrule ...
From one of our finest historical writers, The Abbott's Tale is an intimate portrait of a priest and performer, a visionary, a traitor and confessor to kings - the man who can change the fate of England.
The book suffers at points from the limitations of a first-person narrator point of view. Dunstan's voice, although enjoyable, is that of an old man looking to the past and this keeps many of the other characters at a distance. What the novel lacks in dramatic tension, however, it makes up for in its epic sweep and immersion into a fully realized vision of the past. From the smelting of coins to the crowning of kings and hunting for stag in the wilds of the countryside, The Abbot's Tale captures the imagination and engages the senses...continued
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(Reviewed by Kate Braithwaite).
Nowadays famous for its music festival, held in nearby Pilton, Glastonbury is a small English town in Somerset, with a population of around 9000 people. In the 10th century, before Dunstan, the character in The Abbot's Tale arrived there and built the first great Glastonbury Abbey, it was little more than a medieval village, but still one with a long history behind it.
With evidence of habitation dating back to the Iron and Bronze Age, the name Glastonbury, and the presence of Benedictine monks living there, appear to date from the 7th century, and are Anglo-Saxon in origin. Glastonbury in the 10th century was an island dominated by a tor, or hill, and although the land has long since been drained, the expanse of flat, low land, with ...
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