Harlequin

By: Bernard Cornwell

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Hardcover | 1 September 2000

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Harlequins are lost souls, so loved by the devil that he would not take them to hell, but left them to roam the earth. In French the word is hellequin - the name given to the English archers who crossed the Channel to lay a country to waste. Thomas of Hookton is one of those archers. When his village is sacked by French raiders, he makes a promise to God: to retrieve the relic stolen from Hookton's church. Escaping his father's ambitions, he becomes a wild youth who delights in the life of an army on the warpath. Driven by his conscience and protected by his fearsome skills, he enters a world where lovers become enemies and enemies become friends, where his only certainty is that somewhere, beyond a horizon smeared with the smoke of fires set by the rampaging English army, a terrible enemy awaits him. This enemy would harness the power of Chistendom's greatest relic: the Grail itself. Here, in the first book of a new series, the quest begins. It leads him through the fields of France, to the village of Crecy where two great armies meet on the hillside to do battle.

Industry Reviews

Harlequins were originally lost souls, so much in the devil's favour that he left them free to roam the world. The name was given by the French to the English archers who crossed the Channel to spread devastation and terror. Cornwell's hero Thomas of Hookton is one of these archers. After his village is sacked by raiders, he rebels against his father's fond wish that he take holy orders and becomes one of the crack archers in the army of Edward the Second. Edward and his son, The Black Prince, are off to conquer France, where the archers will be the deciding factor in the invasion. It will be no surprise to the readers of Cornwell's superbly detailed historical novels that the universe presented here has a vividness and colour that takes the breath away. His protagonists inhabit a bloody and dangerous world, conjured up with broad and striking brushstrokes, with the historical background and Thomas's amorous involvement with a Breton widow rendered with equal skill. The novel becomes a quest for Christendom's holiest relic, the Grail itself, and Thomas moves from being a pawn in a game of kings to being a crucial participant in the greatest of all epic quests. This is the first book of Cornwell's Grail Quest sequence, and if the journey that Cornwell is planning for Thomas has a fraction of the power and drama of this first outing, many readers will be eager to continue this particular odyssey. (Kirkus UK)

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