Shadowborne

by Roger Norman

In the library of Sherborne School is a 16th century manuscript, The Book Of Shadowborne, giving a history of Sherborne which suggests an alternative origin for the town’s name, a different reason for Aldhelm’s appointment as bishop and a new explanation for the siting of the Bishop’s palace. Grindlay, the school librarian, is impressed by age of roger norman shadowbornethe ms. and by its apparent author, the Abbess of Shaftesbury. He believes the signature to be false – the ideas are hardly those of the Head of a powerful religious house – but is struck by a curious intelligence in the writing.

Among Grindlay’s colleagues is Austin Kelynack, member of the X-Club, where he rubs shoulders with Huxley and Wallace and other leading lights of the new agnosticism. Kelynack’s ambition is an Oxford fellowship and the book he thinks will win it for him is a new History of England, without the church. In Kelynack’s version, the church represents a distraction to the real source of the nation’s greatness, a Darwinian aristocracy of talent, whose origins he traces to the Indo-European tribes who brought to the island bronze weapons and iron implements and whose presence is indicated by the amber in their burial mounds. According to local legend, such a mound was flattened by the builders of the Bishop’s palace and Kelynack decides on an excavation beneath the ruined keep.

The party of excavators includes Timmins, ex-pugilist, a gifted Sherborne boy called Louis Yeoman, the former wife of the Headmaster, Isadora Magdalensky, an elegant and unpredictable Russian woman, and her maid Françoise. A house is rented in Castleton, local labourers are hired to dig, and on the first day, the burnt remnants of a young woman are found. Medieval, says Kelynack, but why there, under the Tower Keep? The deeper they dig, the more surprising the finds … and the more tense the relations between the excavators.

The Book Of Shadowborne contains an oddly coherent explanation for these matters and a sinister premonition of the events that follow, but the Sherborne Constable has an alternative version which, if true, would send Isadora to the gallows.

253 pages, Hardcover

First published October 22, 2012

About the author

I wrote Albion's Dream in six months; Red Die took me 18 years (!), Shadowborne also went through many revisions. These made the dice trilogy, ghost stories in which the present is haunted by the past. Treetime was written for younger children and led to my fruitful relationship with the Istanbul publishers Yapi Kredi, who have published some of my stories directly into Turkish. Treetime is in its 20th edition in Turkey. My new book is a collection of short stories called Borrowed Voices, in which the only ghosts are literary.

I spent the 1980s in Greece and have lived in Turkey for much of the last twenty years. Before all that I was a Dorset lad and there's been an element of exile in these long sojourns abroad. Perhaps writing about the rivers and tracks and woodlands of the Blackmore Vale as they were fifty or a hundred and fifty years ago is my way of keeping in touch with the loveliest of English counties.

For a dozen years during the late nineties and early noughties I worked for the UN as an educational consultant and am deeply grateful to that vast, cumbersome, irritating and irreplaceable organization for the opportunity to work in some of the most astonishingly beautiful places you can imagine - Vietnam by the Chinese border, Uganda under the Mountains of the Moon, Nepal-without-cars and the highlands of Lesotho.

My English books are distributed by the Sundial Press (www.sundialpress.co.uk), a small and friendly publishing house with a list where a handful of living authors are lucky enough to rub shoulders with the likes of Llewelyn Powys and AE Coppard.

Anyone contacting me via the Goodreads website will get a proper reply, even if not at once.