The Book of Kells

Locus Award nominee 1986.

John Thornburn was a quiet man, drawn to Ireland by its mystery and majesty, and by the solitude it gave him for his art.

But then one day, as Celtic pipes played, John opened a portal through time to an Ireland a thousand years earlier, an age of magic, turmoil and bloodshed. There he lost his heart to Ailesh, a lovely young woman who had seen her family and village ravished in a viking raid.

Accompanied by Derval, a friend and sometime lover from the present, and Labres MacCullen, a roguish but gifted poet from Ailesh's time, John embarked on a quest for justice that would take him from a miraculous encounter with an ancient goddess, to the barbaric splendour of the court of the King of Dublin, to a holy place where he would discover an awesome destiny.