Return of the Shade - Softcover

Bevis Longstreth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0979004624 ISBN 13: 9780979004629

Publisher: Full Circle Press, 2009

Synopsis

What a family! And what a queen! Parysatis-daughter of one king, wife to another and mother of a third-has long wanted to tell her own story, to rip it from the hands of the Greek historians who loved to hate her. In Return of the Shade, this layered and complex ruler finds her champion in author Bevis Longstreth. "To be honest," Parysatis tells us, "the Greeks got more than my wealth right. But knowing how power is used is worthless without understanding why." Return of the Shade puts us behind the royal screen to witness up close what absolute power combined with pride, ambition, and sibling rivalry wrought within the Achaemenid family of great Persian kings, and across their now forgotten Empire-at the time the greatest on earth. This queen of ancient Persia is devious, conniving, and mesmerizing. It would be a shame to miss her. "A deeply felt, dramatic, eminently readable re-creation of life in a royal court of ancient Persia. Longstreth's ambitious, ruthless and yet paradoxically appealing heroine deserves a place in the annals of feminism." -Marie Winn, author of Central Park in the Dark

About this title

About the Author:

Author Profile by Bevis Longstreth I have now written three historical novels: Spindle and Bow, Return of the Shade and Boats Against the Current. The characters developed in each story are wrapped around a particular period of history that I knew just enough about to know I didn’t know much, and about which I wanted to know a great deal more. As a lawyer for most of my professional life, I knew and enjoyed research. And I knew and enjoyed writing that tried to achieve objectives with the reader, be they to inform, enlighten, persuade or engender feelings of passion, hatred, envy, anger or whatever. It seemed natural to turn to history as the platform for making up characters and the stories of their lives. And there was another reason, if I were to be honest and complete. Old folks like me often need a trainer to force them to do the exercises that, theoretically, they could do alone. These novels were my trainer, forcing me to research the period of history I needed to know to write a novel, but might not have the zeal and energy to take on without the prospect of having that research enable a novel to be born, as Michangelo’s chisel enabled his famous Prisoners to be released.

About this edition

• Publisher: Full Circle Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0979004624
• ISBN 13: 9780979004629
• Binding: Perfect Paperback
• Number of pages: 248