Sunday, August 20, 2006

C J Sansom - Sovereign

The long(ish) wait is now over for the latest instalment of the Matthew Shardlake series. 'Sovereign' came out on Friday and the first review I've seen is in today's Sunday Times which begins :

"Don’t open this book if you have anything urgent pending. Its grip is so compulsive that, until you reach its final page, you’ll have to be almost physically prised away from it. The latest in CJ Sansom’s increasingly thrilling series of 16th-century crime mysteries, it pulls you, like its predecessors, into a tortuous world of Tudor terror."

and concludes :

"Exceptionally gifted at re-creating the look, sound and smell of the period, Sansom also excels at capturing its moral and intellectual climate. Collisions of ideology and collusions of religion and politics fascinate him. Winter in Madrid, his fictional foray into civil war Spain, published earlier this year, further testified to this. But it’s in his Tudor novels — of which Sovereign is so intensely imagined an example — that his remarkable talents really blaze out."

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