Award-winning Melvin Burgess packs an enormous punch in this gripping, brilliant and scarily dark futuristic saga. He shies away from nothing in his story of the Volsons and the Connors, two powerful families whose gangs control London, fighting to the death for their rights to rule. When a marriage between Val Volson’s daughter Signy and the Conor is arranged as a way of creating a truce there is a brief moment of hope. But treachery and trickery of the cruellest kind soon destroy any possibility of a lasting peace. From the moment that Signy is so cruelly crippled she plots her revenge and nothing will hold her back from taking it. Drawing on the Icelandic sagas and emulating their darkness, Burgess creates a story that is rich in its understanding of the deepest emotional powers that draw people together and those that drive them apart.
'Love. Hate. So what? This is family. This is business.'London is in ruins. The once-glorious city is now a gated wasteland cut off from the rest of the country and in the hands of two warring families - the Volsons and the Connors.Val Volson offers the hand of his young daughter, Signy, to Connor as a truce. At first the marriage seems to have been blessed by the gods, but betrayal and deceit are never far away in this violent world, and the lives of both families are soon to be changed for ever . . .'Shies from nothing, making it both cruel and magnificent' Guardian 'An epic tale of treachery, deceit, sex, torture, violence, revenge and retribution' Independent on Sunday 'Will rank along with the 20th-century classics' - Sunday TelegraphWinner of the Lancashire Book Award
