Title: Devoted
Description: In this lush epic novel of France's turbulent past, love and war, relgion and mysticisim, mystery and magic intertwine with the everyday passions of men and women swept up in a time of great change. As author Alice Borchardt spins her compelling tale, she reveals her extraordinary talent for fantasy, adventure, and the supernatural. For just as her sister, Anne Rice, made us believe in vampires, Alice Borchardt re-creates a long ao era that lives and breathes on these pages.

Tenth-century France is a land where the Forest People who worship pagan gods are disappearing. Christianity is arriving with a new God and new rulers. And brutal Viking Northmen are swarming from their warships to raze villages and loot the land.

Elin, a woman of the Forest People, is schooled in the strange powers of her mother's people. When Owen, Bishop of Chantalon and a bare twenty-three years of age, rescues Elin from Viking slavery, he knows only that this lovely young woman is a temptation unlike any he has faced before. Yet there is little need for him to choose between his duty and desire, for destiny decrees that they be man and wife. Elin becomes Owen's lady, he becomes her soul, her stars, her sun, and together they usher in a bold new era to Chantalon.

But their idyll is shattered when revolt and betrayal forment, as Vikings attack Chantalon from the north and Owen is captured. It falls to Elin to defend their town, rescue her husband, and preserve the fragile balance of harmony that their love has struck.

A work of deep sensuality and rousing adventure, brimming with colourful characters, Devoted is at once an intricate, superbly researched tapestry of the Middle Ages and an epic of exquisite imagination. Alice Borchardt has written an unforgettable novel that will grip readers on every wondrous page.
Subjects: France, fiction