Eight hundred years have passed since King Connavar of the Rigante and his bastard son, Bane, defeated the invading army of Stone. In that time, Connavar has become a legend, and the Rigante have lost the freedom so many gave their lives to preserve. A conquered people, they live and die under the iron rule of the Varlish, their culture all but destroyed. One woman remains who follows the ancient paths once trod by the Rigante. She is the Wyrd of Wishing Tree Wood, and she alone knows the nature of the evil soon to be unleashed on a doomed and unsuspecting world. In a perilous land, facing an uncertain destiny, she pins her initial hopes on two men: Jaim Grymauch, the giant Rigante fighter, a man haunted by his failure to save the friend he loved from betrayal, and Kaelin Ring, a youth whose deadly talents will earn him the enmity of all Varlish. One will become the Ravenheart, an outlaw leader whose daring exploits will inspire the Rigante. The other will forge a legend and light the fires of rebellion. The Wyrd knows that ultimately all hopes will rest on a third man. Of the bloodline of Connavar the King, he will need to overcome generations of fear and hatred if he is to achieve his destiny. For he is a Varlish nobleman, and - worse - the son of the Rigante's greatest enemy...In Ravenheart, the time-scale of David Gemmell's novels of the Rigante, a Celt-like people living on the fringes of other, more aggressive cultures, reaches a historical period that is the fantasy equivalent of the early 18th century. The Rigante clans are oppressed by their Varlish neighbours, forbidden their traditional dress and culture; only in the hills do the old ways hold and there are plots to destroy even those strongholds by treachery. Young Kaelin is the son of a chief treacherously murdered by the Moidart, the local Varlish overlord; everyone waits to see what will become of him, especially his rowdy mentor Jaim and his cautious foster-mother Maev. What makes this such a likable book is that Gemmell is aware of the sheer complexity of the situation he has created--Kaelin's unsympathetic austere Varlish schoolteacher Alterith becomes practically a hero in his own right through an ethic of scholarship and legalism entirely alien to the Rigante among who he lives. The Moidart's son, Gaise, is a man of more honour than his father and clearly booked to be important in a sequel.--if Gemmell has been reading Walter Scott novels such as Rob Roy, it is considerably to the book's advantage.--Roz Kaveney

Genre: Fantasy