The THIRTY-YEAR DAWN: Long Memory

Before he was the most dangerous man in France, Lucien de Varenne was the third son of a failing house.Burgundy, 1374. The houses that rule it have ruled it longer than anyone alive remembers.Lucien is clever, well-spoken, and utterly out of options. Sent to Dijon to seek favour with the great House d'Auvray, he expects a position. Perhaps influence. Perhaps, in time, the rebuilding of his family's name.He does not expect Celeste de Bellac.He does not expect to fall in love with her, to marry her against the polite expectations of two cities, to find in their small house in the Rue des Trois Lys a happiness so ordinary and so radiant that it begins to undo every ambition that brought him to Dijon in the first place.He does not expect that the d'Auvrays have been watching him since long before he arrived. That his family's debts were not coincidence. That House d'Auvray chooses rarely, and that to be chosen is not a gift one is invited to refuse.When grief takes Celeste, the d'Auvrays are waiting.In a world ruled by ancient houses that do not die, Lucien is about to discover what he was always being chosen for.The Thirty-Year Dawn is a slow-burning, devastating literary gothic, the first novel in The Long Memory, a trilogy of love, ruin, and the long shadow of the houses that have always kept watch over France.For readers of Anne Rice, Hilary Mantel, and Jacqueline Carey.

Pages: 523, Paperback, Independently published