Book Description

The Porphyry Novels: Book One "Gripping and powerful right from the first page." Peter Tonkin, author of Caesar's Spies 1453. After a thousand years, the sun is setting on the Eastern Roman Empire... As a great Ottoman army prepares to strike Constantinople, John Grant is among the mercenaries flocking to the city's defence. Scottish, world-weary and repentant, Grant hopes holy war can bring absolution for a dark past. He soon finds that the cannons and scimitars of the invaders beyond the crumbling walls might prove less lethal than the dangers lurking within them: a Genoese general with a hidden agenda, a firebrand monk with the mob in his thrall, a murderer with a taste for the theatrical. And although Grant has the requisite strength and skills to overcome all of these, in Anna Notaras, the beautiful but monstrously ambitious daughter of Byzantium's richest family, he might have met his match. As the siege reaches its bloody culmination, what can be salvaged, what must be sacrificed to the cataclysmic fires? Recommended for fans of Dorothy Dunnett, Bernard Cornwell and Ben Kane. Porphyry and Ash is the first in a new series set during the Ottoman conquests of the 15th century. Peter Sandham is the author of a series of historical novels set in the second half of the 15th century charting the fall of Constantinople and subsequent geopolitical turmoil through the eyes of Byzantine Greek, Venetian and Ottoman protagonists. Praise for Peter Sandham: "Porphyry and Ash is an accomplished and intelligent feat of historical storytelling. In charting the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, Sandham has created a rich, immersive and gripping reading experience. His pov character, world weary and repentant Scottish mercenary, John Grant, provides the perfect pair of eyes through which to view the richly built and well researched world of 15th C Constantinople." J. A. Ironside, author of The King's Knight. "Plunges the reader into the Byzantine snake-pit that is politics in Constantinople during the months before and during the Turkish siege and conquest of the city. Scottish mercenary John Grant, wrestling with his nightmare memories of burning Joan of Arc at the stake, must balance love and war as the enemy army gathers and the daughter of the doomed city's most powerful citizen becomes dangerously infatuated with him... Gripping and powerful right from the first page, building to an enthralling climax, Porphyry and Ash, based on the biographical records of actual characters, has all the historical weight of Harry Sidebottom's Fire in the East combined with the narrative power of Graham Shelby's Knights of Dark Renown or Alfred Duggan's Count Bohemond." Peter Tonkin, author of Caesar's Spies.