Darkwitch Rising (Troy Game Series #3) » (Reprint)

Sara Douglass was born in Penola, a small farming settlement in the south of Australia, in 1957. She spent her early years chasing (and being chased by) sheep and collecting snakes before her parents transported her to the city of Adelaideand the more genteel surroundings of Methodist Ladies College. Having graduated, Sara then became a nurse on her parents' urging (it was both feminine and genteel) and spent seventeen years planning and then effecting her escape.

That escape came in the form of a Ph.D. in early modern English history. Sara and nursing finally parted company after a lengthy time of bare tolerance, and she took up a position as senior lecturer in medieval European history at the Bendigo campus of the Victorian University of La Trobe. Finding the departmental politics of academic life as intolerable as the emotional rigours of nursing, Sara needed to find another escape.

This took the form of one of Sara's childhood loves - books and writing. Spending some years practising writing novels, HarperCollins Australia picked up one of Sara's novels, BattleAxe (published in North America as The Wayfarer Redemption), the first in the Tencendor series, and chose it as the lead book in their new fantasy line with immediate success. Since 1995 Sara has become Australia's leading fantasy author and one of its top novelists. Her books are now sold around the world.

DARKWITCH RISING is the third title in Sara Douglass's compelling Troy Game series, a riveting historical fantasy series of love and revenge set against the very fabric of time itself.

Britian. An ancient land. Most think they know its history. But few suspect and fewer still know the truth.

For back in the mists of time came Brutus, last of the Trojan kings, who was armed with the knowledge of how to construct a magical Labyrinth that could rival the might of the gods. He was drawn to this place by the alluring sorceress Genvissa and together they almost succeeded in creating the Labyrinth. But in the end they were thwarted by Brutus's wife Cornelia, who understood the danger to the land. Her actions however trapped them all into a endless cycle of death and rebirth until the magic of the Labyrinth is completed.

Ages pass. Time and again the players have come close to victory but each time there is a new wrinkle to stay the fulfillment of power.

The Now that these soul travelers arrive is a most unique one. The English are at war, not with a foreign power but amongst themselves; a mighty Civil War that threatens to destroy a nation. A great pestilence is upon the land and the newly restored Charles II sits upon the throne trying to hold chaos at bay...and he is one of the major players in this drama.

And he is not alone.

Publishers Weekly

The prolix third book in Australian author Douglass's Troy Game historical fantasy saga (after 2004's God's Concubine) exhibits the same powerful imagination as its predecessors, but is not the place to start for newcomers. Brutus, legendary king of Troy, is now incarnate in 17th-century England as one of Charles II's companions, while Charles himself is the Stagking from Celtic folklore. Cornelia, Brutus's wife and a moderating influence, is now a young woman named Noah, while the sorceress Genvissa is now Kate, a prostitute and sex slave to Weyland Orr, the reborn Asterion (the original Minotaur). Asterion's sister, Ariadne, reappears as sharp-tongued as ever, revealing that the Labyrinth is now in the parallel universe of Faerie, while the Troy Game itself is incarnate, and still dangerous, in Noah's daughter, Catling. The stakes rise further when the Game sows plague in England, against which Charles has to unleash the Great Fire of London. Though enriched by the author's historical and folkloric expertise, the somewhat jumbled narrative with its many characters, their shifting alliances and frequently unsympathetic sexual encounters may weary even established fans. Agent, Jim Frenkel. (May 12) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.