The Fiery Cross: 5 (Outlander) - Hardcover

Gabaldon, Diana

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385315279 ISBN 13: 9780385315272

Publisher: Delacorte Press, 2001

Synopsis

The dazzling fifth volume of Diana Gabaldon's extraordinary Outlander saga, featuring 18th-century Scotsman James Fraser and his 20th-century time-traveling wife, Claire Randall.

The year is 1771, and war is coming. Jamie Fraser's wife tells him so. Little as he wishes to, he must believe it, for hers is a gift of dreadful prophecy--a time-traveler's certain knowledge.

Born in the year of Our Lord 1918, Claire Randall served England as a nurse on the battlefields of World War II, and in the aftermath of peace found fresh conflicts when she walked through a cleftstone on the Scottish Highlands and found herself an outlander, an English lady in a place where no lady should be, in a time--1743--when the only English in Scotland were the officers and men of King George's army.

Now wife, mother, and surgeon, Claire is still an outlander, out of place, and out of time, but now, by choice, linked by love to her only anchor--Jamie Fraser. Her unique view of the future has brought him both danger and deliverance in the past; her knowledge of the oncoming revolution is a flickering torch that may light his way through the perilous years ahead--or ignite a conflagration that will leave their lives in ashes....

Grand, sweeping, utterly unforgettable, The Fiery Cross is riveting entertainment, a vibrant tapestry of history and human drama.

About this title

Review:

To describe Diana Gabaldon's novel The Fiery Cross as epic barely does it justice; this massive successor to the much-acclaimed Drums of Autumn weighs in at nearly a 1,000 pages, and is squarely aimed at those readers who want to enter the world of a book and remain thoroughly immersed for a lengthy period. It's essential that such a book can offer riches: riches in dense, complex plotting, riches in larger-than-life protagonists, riches in sheer story-telling skill. Gabaldon, thankfully, has it all.

After a list of acknowledgments that is long enough to tell us that this is an author who takes her time, we are plunged into the Colony of North Carolina in the year 1771, with a volatile society not under threat from Britain so much as from a bitter internal conflict. The divisions are between the colonial aristocracy, secure in their wealth, and the disadvantaged pioneers, carving out a rugged living in the shadow of the mountains of the west. Caught between them is Jamie Fraser of Fraser's Ridge, who is at ease with both sides. But Jamie's wife is the beautiful Claire, unable to integrate in the manner of her husband, always out of place. Her ability to discern the future warns of the pending revolution, and in the bloodshed that follows, the love of Jamie and Claire will be tested in the forge of war.

Gabaldon's canvas frequently evokes the epoch-spanning South of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, but Gabaldon is very much her own woman: this is romantic writing, but tempered with a steel edge that makes for an exuberant, turbulent blockbusting read.--Barry Forshaw

Review:

"Addictive in the extreme."--Toronto Star

"A word-of-mouth cult success and a publishing phenomenon."--Kitchener-Waterloo Record

"Leaving out the history, the time-travel and fantastical subplots, the wit and irony, battles and heroes and villains, what will keep loyal readers and attract new is this fine portrait of two immensely admirable and interesting characters." --London Free Press

About this edition

• Publisher: Delacorte Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0385315279
• ISBN 13: 9780385315272
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 992