The Pale Horseman (The Saxon Chronicles Series #2)

Paperback, 384 pages

English language

Published Dec. 26, 2006 by HarperCollins.

ISBN:
978-0-06-114483-7
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(21 reviews)

Uhtred is a Saxon, cheated of his inheritance and adrift in a world of fire, sword, and treachery. He has to make a choice: whether to fight for the Vikings, who raised him, or for King Alfred the Great of Wessex, who dislikes him.In the late ninth century, Wessex is the last English kingdom. The rest have fallen to the Danish Vikings, a story told in The Last Kingdom, the New York Times bestselling novel in which Uhtred's tale began. Now the Vikings want to finish England. They assemble the Great Army, whose one ambition is to conquer Wessex. A dispossessed young nobleman, married to a woman who hails from Wessex, Uhtred has little love for either, though for King Alfred he has none at all. Yet fate, as Uhtred learns, has its own imperatives, and when the Vikings attack out of a wintry darkness to shatter the last English …

25 editions

Review of 'The Pale Horseman (The Saxon Chronicles Series #2)' on 'Goodreads'

This book holds the distinction of having probably the best rendered, best written battle scene I've ever read. It's slow and painful, purposefully so, and perfectly explains every part of the fight, so the reader is never confused or caught off guard by developments in the fighting. Every part of the army makes sense, their movements and their gambits.

This book renders mood wonderfully in general; the scenes with the dying infant (no spoilers), the miserable waiting months in the swamp, the final battle itself, all have distinct moods that are rendered inexorably in my memory.

Possibly my favorite Cornwell yet.

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Subjects

  • General
  • Fiction
  • Fiction - Historical
  • Action & Adventure
  • Historical - General
  • Sagas
  • Fiction / General
  • 0-1066
  • 849-899
  • Alfred,
  • Alfred, 871-899
  • Great Britain
  • History
  • King of England,