Born Osbert, younger son of Uhtred, ealdorman of Bebbanburg, on the coast of Northumbria, robust, war-loving Uhtred got renamed on the death of his older brother, killed by the Danes who, on a later raid, seized the lad and, admiring his spunk, kept him as a sort of pet. Opening yet another series, Cornwell, who turns out about two high-quality historicals a year ( Sharpe’s Escape, 2004, etc.) without breaking a sweat, examines, through the eyes of a reluctant vassal, the career of the only English king to rate a Great.
This thrilling adventure-based on existing records of Bernard Cornwell's ancestors-depicts a time when law and order were ripped violently apart by a pagan assault on Christian England, an assault that came very close to destroying England.A dispossessed Northumbrian gets a military education from the Danes before reluctantly signing on to serve the humorless Wessexian king, he who will eventually become Alfred the Great (849–99). Above all, though, he wishes to recover his father's land, the enchanting fort of Bebbanburg by the wild northern sea. By now he is a young man, in love, trained to fight and ready to take his place in the dreaded shield wall. He certainly has no love for Alfred, whom he considers a pious weakling and no match for Viking savagery, yet when Alfred unexpectedly defeats the Danes and the Danes themselves turn on Uhtred, he is finally forced to choose sides. The story is seen through the eyes of Uhtred, a dispossessed nobleman, who is captured as a child by the Danes and then raised by them so that, by the time the Northmen begin their assault on Wessex (Alfred's kingdom and the last territory in English hands) Uhtred almost thinks of himself as a Dane. This is the exciting-yet little known-story of the making of England in the 9th and 10th centuries, the years in which King Alfred the Great, his son and grandson defeated the Danish Vikings who had invaded and occupied three of England's four kingdoms. The first installment of Bernard Cornwell's New York Times bestselling series chronicling the epic saga of the making of England, "like Game of Thrones, but real" (The Observer, London)-the basis for The Last Kingdom, the hit Netflix series.
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