The Fiery Cross: (Outlander 5) - Softcover

Gabaldon, Diana

4.26

210,465 ratings by Goodreads

9780099710011: The Fiery Cross: (Outlander 5)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099710013 ISBN 13: 9780099710011

Publisher: Arrow, 2002

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THE FIFTH NOVEL IN THE BESTSELLING OUTLANDER SERIES.

1771: the Colony of North Carolina stands in an uneasy balance, with the rich, colonial aristocracy on one side and the struggling pioneers of the backcountry on the other.

Between them stands Jamie Fraser, a man of honour, a man of worth. Exiled from his beloved Scotland, he is at last possessed of the land he has longed for. By his side his extraordinary wife, Claire, a woman out of time and out of place, blessed with the uneasy gift of the knowledge of what is to come. In the past, that knowledge has brought both danger and deliverance to Jamie and Claire. Now it could be a flickering torch that will light their way through the perilous years ahead - or might ignite a conflagration that will leave their lives in ashes.

The Fiery Cross is by turns poignant, page-turning, meticulous in its historical detail and searingly passionate.

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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:

"A story that is both moving and magical" (Northern Echo)

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