Cushla

And Lucifer said: “Let us rise against Him now in all our numbers, and pull the walls of heaven down…”

The year is 1348. Thomas, a disgraced knight, has found a young girl alone in a dead Norman village. An orphan of the Black Death, and an almost unnerving picture of innocence, she tells Thomas that plague is only part of a larger cataclysm—that the fallen angels under Lucifer are rising in a second war on heaven, and that the world of men has fallen behind the lines of conflict.

Is it delirium or is it faith? She believes she has seen the angels of God. She believes the righteous dead speak to her in dreams. And now she has convinced the faithless Thomas to shepherd her across a depraved landscape to Avignon. There, she tells Thomas, she will fulfill her mission: to confront the evil that has devastated the earth, and to restore to this betrayed, murderous knight the nobility and hope of salvation he long abandoned.

As hell unleashes its wrath, and as the true nature of the girl is revealed, Thomas will find himself on a macabre battleground of angels and demons, saints, and the risen

dead, and in the midst of a desperate struggle for nothing less than the soul of man.

"Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic..."

I would add to that quote Barry Unsworth's Morality Play.

I love Christopher Buehlman novels, every one is different and you never can assume anything, you have no idea what you are going to get. From the brilliant opening sequence to the poignant ending this apocalyptic tale of a hopeless quest undertaken by a fallen knight, a drunkard priest and an young girl is truly epic. Masterly storytelling walks a perfect line between fantasy and reality and drives the reader on and on and the superb characters live on in your mind long after you have closed the book

It is a tale of opposites; good and evil, beauty and horror, love and hate, holy and profane etc Great to see a dystopian novel set in the past, punctuated with actual historical events; Battle of Crécy, the Avignon Papacy and of course the Black Death. 14th century France is hell on earth, literally. I loved it, plus it has the best swearing ever.....

"And the Lord made no answer...."