New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2003. A nice reading copy. Pages are clean and bright. Binding is tight. Book and jacket show some shelfwear. Jacket has a small tear at the top of the front flap.. First American Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good/Good.

Synopsis

This is a novel of many pleasures: a passionate and tender interracial love story that is also an fascinating scholarly detective tale. A young Oxford don named Michael Foxwist and a group of his academic friends come upon a collection of dusty old documents; they are intrigued to learn of the clandestine seventeenth-century marriage of the black prince, Pelagius, and Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia. With mounting excitement, they discover that the true queen of England may not be the familiarly dowdy elderly woman of German extraction but a young and gifted black scientist of independent mind. She lives in Barbados and is the last living descendant of Elizabeth and Pelagius. Michael confronts her with her heritage only to find that she refuses to be the child of destiny and insists on being herself. But their meeting changes everything -- they fall in love. Of different race, nationality, and temperament, they must reexamine all their assumptions and the terms on which they live. Though written to be read independently, The Empress of the Last Days is also the triumphant conclusion to Jane Stevenson's acclaimed historical trilogy, companion to The Winter Queen and The Shadow King. Often compared to such writers as Penelope Fitzgerald and A. S. Byatt, Stevenson once again gives us a splendid work of rich imagination, lively erudition, warm humanity, and wit.

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Details

Bookseller: after-words bookstore (US)
Bookseller's Inventory #: 059330
Title: The Empress of the Last Days
Author: Stevenson, Jane
Format/Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Used - Very Good
Jacket Condition: Good
Edition: First American Edition
ISBN 10: 0618149147
ISBN 13: 9780618149148
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co.
Place of Publication: New York
Date Published: 2003
Keywords: FICTION HISTORICAL
Bookseller catalogs: Fiction Historical; Fiction Adventure;

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after-words bookstore

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Glossary

Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:

Jacket: Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...
Tight: Used to mean that the binding of a book has not been overly loosened by frequent use.
Reading Copy: Indicates a book that is perfectly serviceable for reading. It may have a defect or damage. As such, reading copy is not a...
Shelfwear: Minor wear resulting from a book being place on, and taken from a bookshelf, especially along the bottom edge.