Hild
Nebula Award nominee 2014.
A brilliant, lush, sweeping historical novel about the rise of the most powerful woman of the Middle Ages: Hild.
Hild is born into a world in transition. In seventh-century Britain, small kingdoms are merging, usually violently. A new religion is coming ashore; the old gods’ priests are worrying. Edwin of Northumbria plots to become overking of the Angles, ruthlessly using every tool at his disposal: blood, bribery, belief.
Hild is the king’s youngest niece. She has the powerful curiosity of a bright child, a will of adamant, and a way of seeing the world — of studying nature, of matching cause with effect, of observing human nature and predicting what will happen next — that can seem uncanny, even supernatural, to those around her. She establishes herself as the king’s seer. And she is indispensable — until she should ever lead the king astray. The stakes are life and death: for Hild, her family, her loved ones, and the increasing numbers who seek the protection of the strange girl who can read the world and see the future.
Hild is a young woman at the heart of the violence, subtlety, and mysticism of the early medieval age — all of it brilliantly and accurately evoked by Nicola Griffith’s luminous prose. Recalling such feats of historical fiction as Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, Hild brings a beautiful, brutal world — and one of its most fascinating, pivotal figures, the girl who would become St. Hilda of Whitby — to vivid, absorbing life.
Nicola Griffith
Nicola Griffith is the author of the novels Ammonite, Slow River, The Blue Place, Stay, Always, So Lucky, and Hild as well as the multimedia memoir And Now We Are Going to Have a Party. Her books have won two Washington State Book Awards, the Nebula, Otherwise/Tiptree, and World Fantasy Awards, and six Lambda Literary Awards. She is the founder and co-host of #CripLit and co-edited of the Bending the Landscape series of original queer fantasy/science fiction/historical stories. A wheelchair boxer, Griffith holds a Ph.D. from Anglia Ruskin University and is married to writer Kelley Eskridge. She is a native of Yorkshire, England, and now lives in Seattle.
Light of the World
Trilogy.
Light of the World consists of two books and series is set to expand with the upcoming release of one more book. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
