num_pages: 510
description:  'I despised men who accepted their fate. I shaped mine twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands'It is 1547 and, after five years imprisonment and exile far from his homeland, Francis Crawford of Lymond - scholar, soldier, rebel, nobleman, outlaw - has at last come back to Edinburgh.But for many in an already divided Scotland, where conspiracies swarm around the infant Queen Mary like clouds of midges, he is not welcome.Lymond is wanted for treason and murder, and he is accompanied by a band of killers and ruffians who will only bring further violence and strife.Is he back to foment rebellion? Does he seek revenge on those who banished him?  Or has he returned to clear his name?No one but the enigmatic Lymond himself knows the truth - and no one will discover it until he is ready . . .'A storyteller who could teach Scheherazade a thing or two about pace, suspense and imaginative invention'New York Times
  '
Melodrama of the most magnificent kind' The Guardian
language: English
title: The Game of Kings
titlecomplete: The Game of Kings (The Lymond Chronicles, #1)
characters: Thomas Erskine, Francis Crawford of Lymond, Richard Crawford, Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, Christian Stewart, Mary of Guise, Queen of Scots, Mary Queen of Scots
genres: Adventure, Classics, Historical, Fantasy, Novels, Scotland, Romance, Historical Fiction, 16th Century, Fiction
ratings_count: 9379
places: Scotland
series: The Lymond Chronicles
publisher: Penguin