his saga of yearning and mystery travels across oceans and continents to Iceland, Greenland, and North America during the time in history when Anglo-Saxons battled Vikings and the Norsemen discovered America. The marked contrasts between powerful royalty, landless peasants, Viking warriors and noble knights are expertly brought to life in this gripping tale of the French prince named Rumon. Shipwrecked off the Cornish coast on his quest to find King Arthur's legendary Avalon, Rumon meets a lonely girl named Merewyn and their lives soon become intertwined. Rumon brings Merewyn to England, but once there he is so dazzled by Queen Alrida's beauty that it makes him a virtual prisoner to her will. In this riveting romance, Anya Seton once again proves her mastery of historical detail and ability to craft a compelling tale that includes real and colorful personalities such as St. Dunstan and Eric the Red.
Early 19th century decor for a good story - a holding drama and colorful. Miranda, Bible-bred farm girl with a romantic head and pretty face gets a chance to live her dream when she is requested as companion to the child of a wealthy relative. He is Nicholas Van Ryn, upper New York state Dutch aristocracy, arrogant, handsome, married to Johanna whom he loathes, Johanna, heavy, indolent, gluttonous. Impressed with the elegance of Dragonwyck, the dark glamour of Nicholas, Miranda falls in love and after Johanna's sudden death, they are married. Then she realizes his satanic qualities, his violence, the latent egomania; eventually facing the fact that he had murdered Johanna and that he was a victim of opium. Her baby has died and she fears that she too will be his victim. Finally, with the aid of a young doctor she breaks away, and Nicholas is killed in a last flamboyant gesture. (Kirkus Reviews) --Kirkus Reviews --This text refers to the Library Binding edition.
7- The Torquoise:
First published in 1946, The Turquoise was the great historical novelist Anya Seton’s third novel and sold close to a million copies. It is the story of a beautiful, gifted woman who leaves the magic mountains of her native New Mexico for the piratical, opulent, gaslit New York of the 1870s—only to end her search for happiness back in the high, thin air of Santa Fe.
Santa Fe Cameron, named for the place of her birth, was the child of a Spanish mother and a Scotch father and inherited from both a high degree of psychic perceptivity. Natanay, an American Indian, saw this and gave the little orphan a turquoise amulet as a keepsake; this turquoise, the Indian symbol of the spirit, dominates her life.
For Santa Fe Cameron, life is made up of violent contrasts: the rough wagon of the gay young Irish medicine vendor who brings her East and the scented hansom cabs and carriages waiting before her own Fifth Avenue mansion; the glittering world of the Astors and a dreary cell in the Tombs. All the color, excitement, and rich period detail which distinguish Anya Seton’s novels are here, together with one of her most unusual heroines.
8-Foxfire:
Amanda Lawrence, a charming, sheltered New York socialite, fell in love with Jonathan Dartland, a part-Apache mining engineer who belonged to the vastness of the Arizona desert. Amanda responded to his strength and self-reliance, but had nothing and nobody to guide her when she followed him to the grim town of Lodestone. . . .
Foxfire was the book Anya Seton completed immediately before embarking on her best-remembered book, Katherine, and it was soonmade into a successful Hollywood movie starring Jane Russell and Jeff Chandler. The book does for the desert Southwest of the Great Depression what Katherine did for Chaucer’s England--makes a forgotten age come alive in all its rich strangeness and passion-filled glory.
