Place of Repose: St Cuthbert’s Last Journey
Ebook
The year is 875, and the Danish King of York, Halfden Ragnarsson, is carrying fire and sword across Northumbria, burning churches and monasteries and killing their inhabitants. The once-great Christian kingdom is at the mercy of the heathen. The monks of Lindisfarne flee, taking the relics of Saint Cuthbert and the Lindisfarne Gospels with them. Their journey in search of a new home for the Saint lasts for seven years and changes the lives of the men who bear him for ever.
Katharine Tiernan's second novel is a tale of violence and intrigue, revenge and reconciliation – and of true love lost and found. An extraordinary story combines with the skilful and engaging recreation of characters and relationships at this fateful moment in the survival of Northumbria. Always in the background is the mysterious presence of Cuthbert, as the threads of destiny that will bind heathen and Christian, Dane and Saxon start to weave together.
The story is a present-tense narrative, and unrolls like a film. It’s finely imagined. Lapwings sing, timbers crack, and there is a terrifying shipwreck. The saint is always present, directing events through dreams and miracles.
Katharine Tiernan’s prose is as clear-minded and unpretentious as it is beguiling. She is intensely immersed in her story and its location and captures a sense of time and place in an unpretentious and engaging style. The vision of that wet, damp mizzle and the sensation of chill winds contrasting with the rare bliss of roaring fires, makes blanched skin tingle. During the course of this epic undertaking, we explore the characteristics of those most closely involved in it and whose lives evolve within its complications and are inevitably changed by them.
It is a delightful and attractively produced publication.
- Title: Place of Repose: St Cuthbert’s Last Journey
- Author: Katharine Tiernan
- Publisher: Sacristy Press
- Print Publication Date: 2020
- Logos Release Date: 2023
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781789590814, 9781789590784, 1789590787, 9781789590807, 1789590809, 1789590817
- Resource ID: LLS:9781789590814
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2023-07-12T09:36:46Z
Katharine Tiernan is a Northumbrian by birth and spent many childhood afternoons on the shores of Lindisfarne. She studied English Literature at York University and worked as a teacher and community artist. By the turn of the millennium, both Katharine and her Australian husband were hankering for the wide-open spaces of the north and moved back to Northumberland. Cuthbert: The Making of a Saint sees Katharine return to the Anglo-Saxon world of early Christianity. It reflects her interests in literature, spirituality and the inspirational landscapes of the north.