Hades' Daughter (Troy Game Series #1) » (Revised)

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.

Ancient Greece: A place where the gods hold mortal life cheap, mere playthings to amuse, delight, and abuse at their will.

But those puny mortals are not wholly devoid of power and at the core of their fabulous city-states lies the Labyrinth, where they can shape the powers of the heavens to their own design. When Theseus entered the Labyrinth and came away with the prize of freedom and his beloved Adrianne, Mistress of the Labyrinth, his future seemed assured... Until he abandoned her for the unforgivable sin of bearing him only a daughter, and the world seemed to change. From that day forward, all the Labyrinths in the ancient world started to decay. It slowly became clear that power was fading from the city-states.

Was it the natural decline that comes to all cultures or was it because the power of the Labyrinth had been corrupted by a woman spurned?

A hundred years pass—Troy has fallen and the Trojans are a scattered and humbled people. The warrior Brutus is of the line of kings and gods. He wears the golden kingship bands of Troy proudly—but they are his only mementos of a former glory, for he is a man without a country and is left little else but pride and a memory of the latent power that he could wield if but given a chance. When he receives a god-sent vision of a distant shore where he can rebuild the ancient kingdom, he will move heaven and earth to reach his destiny.

Ever eastward he is drawn, to a lovely and mystical green land that offers him a haven—and a dream of power and conquest. Nothing will deter him... not even the entreaties of the young princess whom he took as his wife and bedded against her will. First her hatred—and now her love—torment and bind him. She is the only one who realizes the danger he is stepping into, and she will do anything to save him... and his son, whom she carries in her womb.

For in the mists of Albion there lies a woman of power—a woman who has used her siren call to cloud Brutus's mind and has her own reasons for luring the warrior to these lush shores....

She is the long-descended granddaughter of Adrianne, and she has in her heart a hatred that has been passed down for generations. Her plans for Brutus will enact a revenge that could destroy the gods themselves.

s20If Brutus makes the journey successfully, it will be the next step in the Game of the Labyrinth and might start a complicated contest of wills that could span centuries....

Publishers Weekly

In this dazzling start to a new trilogy, Australian author Douglass (StarMan) once again combines mythology, fantasy, magic and romance to produce a consistent, well-rounded story full of seriously flawed characters both abhorrently evil and enthrallingly empathetic. Ariadne, daughter of the Minoan king of Crete and Mistress of the Labyrinth, has betrayed her family for the sake of her lover, Theseus. When Theseus deserts her after she gives birth to a girl, Ariadne spits out a curse ("No one abandons the Mistress of the Labyrinth!... Not you, nor any part of your world!") that sets in motion a twisting, turning plot that centers a century later on Troy and the efforts of Brutus, the leader of that fallen city, to regain his kingdom. Brutus has already murdered his father to clear his path to the throne, and when an opportunity to seize another kingdom presents itself, he grabs it with no thought to the consequences. Ariadne, now in the form of Genvissa of Llangarlia, uses Brutus's greed and self-confidence to take another step forward in her revenge-a revenge that involves renewing "the Game" and the Labyrinth at its heart. The deliciously despicable main characters all play their part in the Game and in the making or breaking of the Labyrinth, leading to many unintended results. Douglass continually surprises, and readers will eagerly await the next two books, which promise to carry the action up to modern-day London. (Jan. 27) FYI: The author has won two Aurealis Awards. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.