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Britain Invaded at the Dawn of Time

Set in the grey, twilight world of the Stone Age, when the line between magic and reality was less easily drawn - and more easily crossed - than it is today, this novel tells of the 'Barley Dream', that web of ritual and human sacrifice without which the corn could not be made to grow.

Garroch, young chieftain of a primitive and taboo-ridden community, turns back for a while the invasion of the fair-haired strangers from the north. But when he falls under the spell of the sensual Isca, the princess who rides with them, the Barley Dream is threatened by the magic of the Sun...

But THE GOLDEN STRANGERS is no romance. Poetry and violence are equally matched in it: and through a stark and unmitigated realism Henry Treece conveys what it must have been like to 'believe in magic'.

A.D.30 - A.D.56

Battle, intrigue and Druidism followed to their brutal conclusions in the dark pre-Christian world of the Celts...

Caradoc and Gwydoc, two Celtic princes and rival heirs to the kingdom of the Belgae, a re driven from their lands into Siluria. Caradoc, who becomes the new king, desperately tries to rally the tribes of Britain against the invading Romans. But his real enemy is the slow erosion of the ideals and traditions of his youth.

Gwyndoc, at first loyal to his brother King, feels betrayed, and starts his own campaign to usurp Caradoc and turn the tide of the invaders.

In this starkly realistic and very human novel. Henry Treece explores a period in British history when magic and murder were matter-of-fact and the 'civilising' influence of Rome had yet to make headway against the dark and powerful undertow of the Celtic spirit.

The Savage Vengeance of Boadicea

I wish there were a man strong enough to stand against me.

AD61: Nero has a comfortable grip on his empire. In Gaul, in Germany, in the Middle East, all is quiet. But in Britain his tax collectors beat and rape the daughters of an obscure minor chieftain, sparking an upheaval that is to cause seventy thousand deaths and bring to his ears the name Boadicea.

Against the backdrop of Boadicea's doomed, bloody rebellion, Henry Treece sets the story of young Gemellus Ennius, whose secret mission is complicated by his love for a British princess, and whose relationship with his Celtic half-brother reflects the conflict between tribalism and civilisation.

Treece's empathic understanding of the Celtic spirit combines here with a masterly attention to detail, in a powerful rendering of the stark, confused, violent mood of the age.

"This is the story of 'King' Arthur, as I think it might have happened," Henry Treece wrote about his novel. The Great Captains is about no romantic ghost but a man of the wild, forbidding world of ancient Britain.