It is the seventeenth century, and once more the players of the troy Game are drawn back into its intricate dance. But this life there is a difference - the troy Game itself takes flesh, and walks. Restoration London becomes the field of the most desperate battle yet. Asterion lurks in a nightmarish lair he has built against the rear wall of the bone house of St Dunstan's-in-the-East. Here he traps Cornelia-reborn Noah Banks, and Genvissa-reborn Jane Orr. Here he manages the ultimate trickery in order to obtain the kingship bands, the troy Game and Noah. But no one could have anticipated an ancient Darkwitch rising from the dead with a secret so terrible it will not merely tear both Game and land apart, but devastate any chance that Noah and her lover, Brutus, can be together. Darkwitch Rising continues the troy Game's journey through ancient labyrinthine secrets. It is the third instalment of this epic four-book series, spanning 3,000 years and the history of one of the world's greatest cities - London.
Sara Douglass was born in Penola, a small farming settlement in the south of Australia, in 1957. She spent her early years chasing (and being chased by) sheep and collecting snakes before her parents transported her to the city of Adelaideand the more genteel surroundings of Methodist Ladies College. Having graduated, Sara then became a nurse on her parents' urging (it was both feminine and genteel) and spent seventeen years planning and then effecting her escape.
That escape came in the form of a Ph.D. in early modern English history. Sara and nursing finally parted company after a lengthy time of bare tolerance, and she took up a position as senior lecturer in medieval European history at the Bendigo campus of the Victorian University of La Trobe. Finding the departmental politics of academic life as intolerable as the emotional rigours of nursing, Sara needed to find another escape.
This took the form of one of Sara's childhood loves - books and writing. Spending some years practising writing novels, HarperCollins Australia picked up one of Sara's novels, BattleAxe (published in North America as The Wayfarer Redemption), the first in the Tencendor series, and chose it as the lead book in their new fantasy line with immediate success. Since 1995 Sara has become Australia's leading fantasy author and one of its top novelists. Her books are now sold around the world.
