The Cross and the Curse: Book 2 of the Bernicia Chronicles.
Less than a year ago, Matthew Harffy published his first novel, The Serpent Sword. It was a stunning debut. So much so that I awaited his second novel with some anxiety. Would it be as good?
I was fortunate that Matthew sent me an advance copy and I was instantly captured by a novel every bit as gripping and accomplished as his first. Like the Serpent Sword, the Cross and the Curse is set in in seventh century Northumbria, a land and time of relentless strife and struggle.
It is published today. I recommend you grab a copy.
Here is my review.
One midnight several years ago I sat at the Great Sphinx listening to love poetry written five thousand years ago. I felt the ache of lost and found kinship with ancient forebears. I feel the same when reading Matthew Harffy’s work.
The best historical fiction enables the reader to simultaneously live in the here and now and the then and there. Matthew Harffy has this skill in abundance. He peoples his work with everyman and everywoman, allowing a bridge across the centuries, a meeting place.
His hero Beobrand is heroic and fallible, his wife Sunniva has the fears and longings of any woman whose young husband is called to battle. Other characters are also very much part of their time while being the sort you might bump into on the street today. King Oswald, for example, has the charisma of a mighty monarch even though his kingdom is a sparsely inhabited, tiny parcel of land. The reader believes Oswald leads a mighty war-host until the author deftly reveals it is made up of merely two hundred men. It is, of course, only two hundred men. Yet at the same time it is a war-host.
While reading The Cross and the Curse I was with the people of seventh century Bernicia as they split timber to make new homes, watched anxiously alongside them to see if the fire would flame enough to send a sacrifice to the gods, felt the terror and thrill of the shield-wall and the disgust and exhilaration of killing while escaping death.
Matthew Harffy’s first novel, The Serpent Sword, was superb. The second book, The Cross and the Curse, is every bit as good. He is one of the most accomplished and exciting voices in the field today. I love his novels and recommend them to you.
