num_pages: 360
description: This is a novel of many an interracial love story that is also a scholarly detective tale. A young Oxford don named Michael Foxwist and a group of his academic friends come upon a collection of dusty old documents; they are intrigued to learn of the clandestine seventeenth-century marriage of the black prince Pelagius and Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia. With mounting excitement, they discover that the true queen of England may not be the familiar dowdy elderly woman of German extraction but a young and gifted black scientist of independent mind. She lives in Barbados and is the last surviving descendant of Elizabeth and Pelagius. Michael confronts her with her heritage only to find that she refuses to be the child of destiny and insists on being herself. But their meeting changes everything - they fall in love. Of different race, nationality, and temperament, they must re-examine all their assumptions and the terms on which they live.Though written to be read independently, The Empress of the Last Days is also the conclusion to Jane Stevenson's acclaimed historical trilogy, companion to The Winter Queen and The Shadow King.
language: English
title: The Empress of the Last Days
titlecomplete: The Empress of the Last Days (Astraea, #3)
genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction
ratings_count: 50
series: Astraea
publisher: Houghton Mifflin