Menewood
A Novel
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by Vox and Autostraddle
Making a much-anticipated return to the world of Hild, Nicola Griffith’s Menewood transports readers back to seventh-century Britain, a land of rival kings and religions poised for epochal change.
Hild is no longer the bright child who made a place in Edwin Overking’s court with her seemingly supernatural insight. She is eighteen, honed and tested, the formidable lady of Elmet, now building her personal stronghold in the valley of Menewood.
But old alliances are fraying. Younger rivals are snapping at Edwin’s heels. War is brewing—bitter war, winter war. Not knowing whom to trust, Edwin becomes volatile and recalls his young advisor to court. There Hild begins to understand the true extent of the chaos ahead—and realizes she must find a way to navigate the turbulence and fight to protect both the kingdom and her own people.
She will face the losses and devastation of total war, and then must summon the determination to forge a radically different path for herself and her people. In the valley, her last redoubt, Hild draws strength from the fierce joy she finds in the natural world, as, slowly, her community takes root. She trains herself and her unexpected allies in new ways of thinking, learning what it means to gather and wield true power. And she prepares for one last wager: risking all on a single throw for a better future.
In the last decade, Hild has become a beloved classic of epic storytelling. Menewood exceeds it in every way.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Griffith follows up Hild with a transportive second volume inspired by the life of St. Hilda of Whitby (614–680), known for advising kings as an abbess and portrayed here as a canny royal leader and fierce warrior in the years before she's recruited by the church. In the first installment, Hild was a precocious child; now, in 632, she's 18 and recently wed to her half brother Cian Boldcloak, with whom she's tasked to protect the highland of Elmet for their king and uncle Edwin, in whose court Hild was raised. Their lives are dictated by the constant threat of war, and by the end of the first act, Cian is killed in battle. Along with descriptions of bloody violence, Griffith colors in the customs and language of early medieval England ("Tide turns as æfen turns to niht," a ship captain tells an impatient Hild while she's on her way to a diplomatic mission in Colud). Though accounts of Hild's vengeful battles drag on a bit too long, there's no shortage of visceral prose (as Hild mounts her mare, Griffith writes: "She felt herself swell, blood coursing rich and thick in her veins, and her heart rose like a great bubble"). Admirers of the first bookwill not be disappointed.
