The other day I was looking at the top shelf of my bookshelf and realized it contains a number of beautiful hardcover books, but they’re not necessarily my favorite novels (due, in part, to the fact that I keep my Bernard Cornwell novels together, and every book I own of The Warlord Chronicles are all…
Bernard Cornwell’s new novel 1356 came out this week in the UK. Unfortunately (and for reasons that still vex me), it won’t be released in the U.S. until January 8, 2013 – but I can hardly wait! The novel is about the famous Battle of Poitiers during the Hundred Years’ War, and it brings back one…
This is my thirtieth post on beginnings, and I think it’s time for a change. Does this mean I’ll never again talk about what makes a great beginning to a novel? Probably not. But it is the end of this series, and likely the beginning of something new every Monday. So, for my final “beginning,”…
For this week’s “beginning,” I chose the first three paragraphs of one of my favorite openings, the beginning of Bernard Cornwell’s Agincourt (here’s my review). Here it is after this image of the book’s cover. On a winter’s day in 1413, just before Christmas, Nicholas Hook decided to commit murder. It was a cold…
Every story needs a protagonist, and often he or she possesses qualities that could be described as “heroic.” A great epic, however, needs a hero in the truest sense of the word. Just look at three of the first four definitions in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary to see what I mean: Definition of HERO a mythological…
For my twenty-eighth “Beginning” of the Week, I’m going back to one of my all-time favorite authors, Bernard Cornwell. Here is the opening passage of The Winter King, the first book in The Warlord Chronicles, his fascinating take on the Arthurian legend. Once upon a time, in a land that was called Britain, these things happened….
A while back I was focused on Viking tales since my second novel has a big Viking component. I’ve unfortunately fallen way behind on both novel #2 and my reviews of great Viking tales, but at least one such tale can serve as my “beginning” of the week. So without further ado, here is the…
Lately I’ve been reading a mix of vintage and more recent novels in the historical and fantasy fiction genres, and I’ve come to realize I can get quite annoyed with narrative viewpoint. Even damn near curmudgeonly about it. Although there are several different types of narrative points-of-view, there are only two I really like, and…
For my tenth “beginning,” I’ve chosen the opening passage of Bernard Cornwell’s The Last Kingdom. This is the first novel in his excellent The Saxon Tales series about the conflict between the Vikings and the English during the reign of Alfred the Great. You can read my review of The Last Kingdom here. This is…
According to Wikipedia, “an antihero … is generally considered to be a protagonist whose character is at least in some regards conspicuously contrary to that of the archetypal hero.” This character is usually the antithesis of the “knight in shining armor.” But what makes him work? In my view, the antihero has to be someone…
Following the release of Death of Kings, I started re-reading some of the earlier novels in Bernard Cornwell’s fantastic series, The Saxon Tales. (You can read my review of The Last Kingdom, the first novel, here.) The books are set in England during the reign of Alfred the Great, who defended the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms against…