The Nameless Day (Crucible Series #1) » (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.

dark medieval fantasy with demons and angels fighting for the world's power

Publishers Weekly

The Black Death has decimated Europe, the Hundred Years War is at a turning point and the English and French peasantry are in open revolt-but is this revolution simply a change whose time has come, or is it due to something far more sinister? In this passionate first volume of a new trilogy by Australian author Douglass (The Wayfarer Redemption), evil is afoot in medieval Christian Europe. The archangel St. Michael has given Brother Thomas Neville, a Dominican friar, a mandate to repel evil and restore order. A difficult man at the best of times, Thomas now believes he's above church strictures and secular control. On top of that, Thomas is trying to forge his way through Europe as it self-destructs, and he can't trust the people around him since the evil that's stalking the world can shift shape and take the form of anyone at anytime. Douglass has again brilliantly blended detailed research with religion and magic to reinterpret actual historical events, here the shift from extreme spiritualism to humanism that began in 14th-century Europe. And as in her Troy series (Hades' Daughter), she manages to make the reader care about self-absorbed, flawed characters who often act out of fear, greed or stupidity. This captivating historical fantasy ranks with the best in the subgenre. Agent, James Frenkel. (July 24) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.