Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra
The Passion of Cleopatra
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- €11.99
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- €11.99
Publisher Description
From the iconic, bestselling author of The Vampire Chronicles—Ramses the Great, former pharaoh of Egypt, is reawakened by the elixir of life in Edwardian England. Now immortal with his bride-to-be, he is swept up in a fierce and deadly battle of wills and psyches against the once-great Queen Cleopatra.
In this mesmerizing, glamorous tale of ancient feuds and modern passions, Ramses has reawakened Cleopatra with the same perilous elixir whose unworldly force brings the dead back to life. But as these ancient rulers defy one another in their quest to understand the powers of the strange elixir, they are haunted by a mysterious presence even older and more powerful than they, a figure drawn forth from the mists of history who possesses spectacular magical potions and tonics eight millennia old. This is a figure who ruled over an ancient kingdom stretching from the once-fertile earth of the Sahara to the far corners of the world, a queen with a supreme knowledge of the deepest origins of the elixir of life.
She may be the only one who can make known to Ramses and Cleopatra the key to their immortality—and the secrets of the miraculous, unknowable, endless expanse of the universe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this slick sequel to The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned (1989), immortals gifted with virtual indestructibility scheme as nastily against one another as the similarly endowed characters in Anne Rice's celebrated Vampire Chronicles. Having imbibed a life-prolonging elixir, pharaoh Ramses the Great is still alive in 1914, when he poses as the dashing Reginald Ramsey and takes his fianc , Julie Stratford, on a tour through England and other interesting locales. The resurrected corpse of the former empress Cleopatra is likewise wandering the globe. Separately, Cleopatra's soul has been reincarnated in Sybil Parker, an American writer of historical romances that are patterned unconsciously on events from the lives of the immortals (and that read much like this novel). Then the ancient empress Bektaten, who first discovered the immortality elixir, enters the picture, along with her conniving former prime minister, Saqnos, who for centuries has been trying to wheedle the formula out of her. Cleopatra, Ramses, and Saqnos vie against one another and Bektaten in their quest to understand and control the magical potion. In their first literary collaboration, the Rices, mother and son, configure these subplots into an entertaining soap opera replete with romantic alliances, betrayals, and ends left tantalizingly loose as grist for sequels. Fans of both authors' work will enjoy this one and agree with Sybil's observation that "stories of romance and adventure and magic helped us to imagine a better world into being."
