The author of The Age #1 bestselling novel The Memory Cathedral returns to Renaissance Italy with a transcendent vision of the ultimate battle between good and evil.
In Shadows in the Stone Jack Dann creates a fully-realized, living, breathing universe, a universe where the Vatican is in Venice, Jehovah is really a lesser god known as the Demiurge, and the magus John Dee's experiments with angels are true and repeatable. Here you'll discover a nun who has the expertise and agility of a Ninja warrior, the reincarnated snake goddess known as the Daughter of Light, the famed Florentine magician Pico Della Mirandola, a young magus who is part stone, the Knights Templar of the Crimson Cross, the sapphire tablet: the most secret of the Dead Sea scrolls, and a 15th Century dirigible kept aloft by imprisoned souls. Here you'll find wild adventure and Machiavellian subtlety, treason and heroism, love and carnality, joy and loss, magic, machines, the cosmic machinations of angels, demons, gods, and half-gods; and the absolutely breathtaking vistas that are their battle grounds.
New York Times bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson has compared Shadows in the Stone with Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, calling it "such a complete world that Italian history no longer seems comprehensible without [Dann's] cosmic battle of spiritual entities behind and within every historical actor and event."
Join Jack Dann's protagonists--Louisa Morgan and Lucian Ben-Hananiah--and the fellowship of The Dark Companions in their apocalyptic battle against the Demiurge--described in the forbidden Gnostic texts as the demon god Yaldabaoth... and known to us as Jehovah.
Industry Reviews
Jack Dann returns to the Italian Renaissance, a very fertile story zone for him, to weave an absorbing novel that presents historical elements of the Renaissance as aspects of an immense cosmic battle of spirits. Somewhat like Susanna Clarkes Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrells treatment of the English Regency period as being a space filled with spirits, Danns Shadows In the Stone creates such a complete world that Italian history no longer seems comprehensible without his cosmic battle of spiritual entities behind and within every historical actor and event. This then serves to suggest that Danns complex network of spiritual entities are also allegories for the various urges and forces that have driven humanity throughout its history, inspiring us to do what weve done. That aspect of his novel creates a kind of X-ray vision through to the underlying realities of human experience which is quite exhilarating, and all this in a novel with all the more usual pleasures of sharply observed place and character and plot. Shadows in the Stone joins Danns The Memory Cathedral, The Rebel, and Promised Land, as one of his deep plunges into historical characters we thought we knew, but whose true natures have never before been seen so clearly and dramatically. Its an amazing gift Jack has. - Kim Stanley Robinson, New York Times bestselling author
Jack Dann has gone beyond alternate world to alternate universe in this stunning take on the Renaissance. His language is eloquent, his characters wholly engagingthis is a book to lose yourself in. Youll be the richer for it. -- Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Bram Stoker Grandmaster and World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award-winning author
