Hardback Edition: February 2008
Paperback Edition: January 2009
368pp
ISBN: 9780340951125
Rome, 609 AD. Empire is a fading memory. Repeatedly fought over and plundered, the City is falling into ruins. Filth and rubble block the streets. Killers prowl by night. Far off, in Constantinople, the Emperor has other concerns. The Church is the one institution left intact, and is now flexing its own imperial muscle.
Enter Aelric of England: young and beautiful, sexually uninhibited, heroic, if ruthlessly violent—and hungry for the learning of a world that is dying around him. In this first of six novels, he’s only here by accident. Without getting that girl pregnant, and the resulting near-miss from King Ethelbert’s gelding knife, he might never have left Kent. But here Aelric is, and nothing on earth will send him back.
The question is how long he will stay on earth. A deadly brawl outside Rome sucks him straight into the high politics of Empire. There is fraud. There is pursuit. There is murder after murder. Soon, Aelric is involved in a race against time to find answers. Who is trying to kill him? Where are the letters everyone thinks he has, and what do they contain? Who is the one-eyed man? What significance to all this has the Column of Phocas, the monument just put up in the Forum to celebrate a tyrant’s generosity to Holy Mother Church?
Aelric does at last get his answers. What he chooses to do with them will shape the future history of Europe and the world….
“Fascinating to read, very well written, an intriguing plot and I enjoyed it very much.”
More details here (print) (e-book)
Hodder & Stoughton, London
Hardback Edition: February 2009
Paperback Edition: May 2010
420pp
ISBN: 9780340951149
610AD. Invaded by Persians and barbarians, the Byzantine Empire is also tearing itself apart in civil war. Phocas, the maniacally bloodthirsty Emperor, holds Constantinople by a reign of terror. The uninvaded provinces are turning one at a time to the usurper, Heraclius.
Just as the battle for the Empire approaches its climax, Aelric of England turns up in Constantinople. Blackmailed by the Papal authorities to leave off his career of lechery and market-rigging in Rome, he thinks his job is to gather texts for a semi-comprehensible dispute over the Nature of Christ. Only gradually does he realise he is a pawn in a much larger game.
What is the eunuch Theophanes up to? Why does the Papal Legate never show himself? How many drugs can the Emperor’s son-in-law take before he loses his touch for homicidal torture? Above all, why has wicked old Phocas taken Aelric under his wing?
To answer these questions, Aelric has nothing on his side but beauty, charm, intellectual brilliance and a talent for cold and ruthless violence.
“[Blake’s] plotting can seem off-puttingly anarchic until the penny drops that everyone is simultaneously embroiled in multiple, often conflicting, scams. Aelric’s survival among the last knockings of empire in Constantinople depends not on deducing who wants him dead, but who wants him dead at any given moment.”
More details here (print) (e-book)
Hodder & Stoughton, London
Hardback Edition: June 2010
Paperback Edition: February 2011
502pp
ISBN: 978-0340951163
The tears of Alexander shall flow, giving bread and freedom…
612 AD. Egypt, the jewel of the Roman Empire, seethes with unrest, as bread runs short and the Persians plot an invasion. In Alexandria, a city divided between Greeks and Egyptians by language, religion and far too few soldiers, the mummy of the Great Alexander, dead for nine hundred years, still has the power to calm the mob—or inflame it…
In this third novel of the series, Aelric of England has become the Lord Senator Alaric and the trusted Legate of the Emperor Heraclius. He’s now in Alexandria, to send Egypt’s harvest to Constantinople, and to force the unwilling Viceroy to give land to the peasants. But the city—with its factions and conspirators—thwarts him at every turn. And when an old enemy from Constantinople arrives, supposedly on a quest for a religious relic that could turn the course of the Persian war, he will have to use all his cunning, his charm and his talent for violence to survive.
“As always, Blake writes with immense historical and classical erudition, while displaying an ability to render 1500-year-old conversations in realistically colloquial English.”
More details here (print) (e-book)
Hodder & Stoughton, London
Hardback Edition: June 2011
Paperback Edition: January 2012
432pp
ISBN: 978-1444709667
687 AD. Expansive and triumphant, the Caliphate has stripped Egypt and Syria from the Byzantine Empire. Farther and farther back, the formerly hegemonic Empire has been pushed—once to the very walls of its capital, Constantinople.
All that has saved it from destruction is the invention of Greek Fire. Is it a liquid? Is it a gas? Is it a gift from God or the Devil? Or is it a recipe found in an ancient tomb? Few know the answer. But all know how it has broken the Islamic advance and restored Byzantine control of the seas.
Yes, without this “miracle weapon,” Constantinople would have fallen in the 7th century, rather than the 15th, and the new barbarian kingdoms of Europe would have gone down one by one before the unstoppable cry of Allah al akbar!
But what importance has all this to old Aelric, now in his nineties, and a refugee from the Empire he’s spent his life holding together? No longer the Lord Senator Alaric, Brother Aelric is writing his memoirs in the remote wastes of northern England, and waiting patiently for death. For company, he has his student, Wilfred, sickly through bright, and Brother Joseph, another refugee from the Empire. Or there’s ghastly Brother Cuthbert to despise—or to envy for his possession of pretty young Edward.
Then a band of northern barbarians turns up outside the monastery—and then another. Almost before he can draw breath, Aelric is a prisoner and, with Edward, headed straight back into the snake pit of Mediterranean rivalries.
Who has snatched Aelric out of retirement, and why? What is the nature of Edward’s fascination with a man more than eighty years his senior? How, together, will they handle the confrontation that lies at the end of their journey—a confrontation that will settle the future of mankind?
Will age have robbed Aelric of his charm, his intelligence, his resourcefulness, or of his talent for cold and homicidal duplicity?
“As always, Blake’s plotting is as brilliantly devious as the mind of his sardonic and very earthy hero. This is a story of villainy that reels you in from its prosaic opening through a series of death-defying thrills and spills.”