The Empress of the Last Days - Hardcover

Stevenson, Jane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618149147 ISBN 13: 9780618149148

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 2004

Synopsis

This is a novel of many pleasures: an interracial love story that is also a 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 familiar dowdy elderly woman of German extraction but a young and gifted black scientist of independent mind. She lives in Barbados and is the last surviving 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 re-examine 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 conclusion to Jane Stevenson's acclaimed historical trilogy, companion to The Winter Queen and The Shadow King.

About this title

Review:

"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)

Book Description:

'Jane Stevenson is a writer of formidable ability' - Sunday Telegraph

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0618149147
• ISBN 13: 9780618149148
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 360