The Fiery Cross (Outlander Series #5) (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition) Diana Gabaldon Author - nuovo libro

Crossing the boundaries of genre with its unrivalled storytelling, Diana Gabaldon's new novel is a gift both to her millions of loyal fans and to the lucky readers who have yet to discover her. In the ten years since her extraordinary debut novel, Outlander, was published, beloved author Diana Gabaldon has entertained scores of readers with her heart-stirring stories and remarkable characters. The four volumes of her bestselling saga, featuring eighteenth-century Scotsman James Fraser and his twentieth-century, time-travelling wife, Claire Randall, boasts nearly 5 million copies in the U.S. The story of Outlander begins just after the Second World War, when a British field nurse named Claire Randall walks through a cleft stone in the Scottish highlands and is transported back some two hundred years to 1743. Here, now, is The Fiery Cross, the eagerly awaited fifth volume in this remarkable, award-winning series of historical novels. The year is 1771, and war is approaching. Jamie Fraser's wife has told him so. Little as he wishes to, he must believe it, for hers is a gift of dreadful prophecy--a time-traveller's certain knowledge. To break his oath to the Crown will brand him a traitor; to keep it is certain doom. Jamie Fraser stands in the shadow of the fiery cross--a standard that leads nowhere but to the bloody brink of war., To describe Diana Gabaldon's novel The Fiery Cross as epic barely does it justice; this massive successor to the much-acclaimed Drums of Autumn weighs in at nearly a 1,000 pages, and is squarely aimed at those readers who want to enter the world of a book and remain thoroughly immersed for a lengthy period. It's essential that such a book can offer riches: riches in dense, complex plotting, riches in larger-than-life protagonists, riches in sheer story-telling skill. Gabaldon, thankfully, has it all.

After a list of acknowledgments that is long enough to tell us that this is an author who takes her time, we are plunged into the Colony of North Carolina in the year 1771, with a volatile society not under threat from Britain so much as from a bitter internal conflict. The divisions are between the colonial aristocracy, secure in their wealth, and the disadvantaged pioneers, carving out a rugged living in the shadow of the mountains of the west. Caught between them is Jamie Fraser of Fraser's Ridge, who is at ease with both sides. But Jamie's wife is the beautiful Claire, unable to integrate in the manner of her husband, always out of place. Her ability to discern the future warns of the pending revolution, and in the bloodshed that follows, the love of Jamie and Claire will be tested in the forge of war.

Gabaldon's canvas frequently evokes the epoch-spanning South of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, but Gabaldon is very much her own woman: this is romantic writing, but tempered with a steel edge that makes for an exuberant, turbulent blockbusting read.--Barry Forshaw