The Empress of the Last Days - Hardcover

Jane Stevenson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1587249294 ISBN 13: 9781587249297

Publisher: Wheeler Publishing, 2005

Synopsis

A New York Times Bestselling Author

When a young Oxford don and his academic friends come upon a collection of dusty old documents, they are intrigued to learn of the clandestine 17th-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 woman of German extraction - but a young and gifted black scientist who lives in Barbados.

About this title

About the Author:

Jane Stevenson is the author of a collection of novellas, Several Deceptions, and three novels, London Bridges, Astraea and The Pretender. She is reader in English at the University of Aberdeen.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* This sophisticated novel has the feel of years of planning--not because it is overdone but because it is intricate, vastly knowledgeable, and well thought out. It is the concluding volume of a trilogy that reimagines the life of Elizabeth of Bohemia, sister of England's Charles I and a lively figure in seventeenth-century politics; it follows The Winter Queen (2002) and The Shadow King (2003) and brings Stevenson's interpretation of the queen's life and lasting effect up to the present day. The trilogy's two previous volumes wondered what would have happened if Elizabeth of Bohemia had married--a second time, and clandestinely--a black African prince and former slave. And now, in her infinite creativity, the author unleashes a group of scholars to unearth and interpret a trove of documents establishing the veracity of that long-ago situation and thus the precedence of an alternative family line of claimants to the British throne. So, who is the rightful monarch of Britain--the current occupant, Queen Elizabeth II, or a black scientist in Barbados? As much about competition in academe as about alternate versions of history, this novel is reminiscent in its learned tone of the works of A. S. Byatt. Brad Hooper
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About this edition

• Publisher: Wheeler Publishing
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1587249294
• ISBN 13: 9781587249297
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 611