The Woods of Arcady
Book Two of The Sanctuary of the White Friars
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A wild desert crossing, a secret island paradise, a hidden underground civilization, plus London and Paris. The multiverse expands as pulp adventure mixes with unreal memoir in the second volume in The Sanctuary of the White Friars series.
In the 1970s, Michael Moorcock, a writer of genre fiction, attempts to save his failing marriage by taking his wife and daughters to Paris. One night in a bar he is amazed to find himself drinking with heroes of story and history. The next day he awakens aboard a sailing ship, kidnapped into another reality by a French highwayman and the four Musketeers, who know Moorcock well from adventures in London's Alsacia...but that was another Moorcock, from another world.
Soon after they reach Africa, the company is rescued from an ambush by Antara, a poet-adventurer who offers to lead them across the desert and through several realities to the estate of Lord and Lady Blackstone. The trip is full of wonders Moorcock has read, dreamed, or written: an underground civilization of nonhuman creatures; a magical oasis where the lion lies down with the lamb; a lush garden inhabited by miniature dinosaurs.
They are pursued by the notorious Jacob Nixer, who also remembers the Alsacia and is determined to destroy Moorcock and his companions.
The main narrative of The Woods of Arcady is punctuated by episodes from the story of the Blackstones and by spirited, freewheeling appearances by Captain Buggerly Otherly and his companions from the Second Ether. As readers move deeper into Moorcock's multiverse, it rises up on all sides, ready to astound.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The ambitiously intertextual second installment to SFWA grandmaster Moorcock's Sanctuary of the White Friars series combines autobiography and fantasy into a genre-bending whole that is as puzzling as it is engaging. Rather than pick up where 2015's The Whispering Swarm left off, the story immediately introduces disorienting new elements, including several characters from Moorcock's past works, before returning to the tale of the fictionalized Michael Moorcock in London. Even this, however, is a different version of Michael than the protagonist readers met in the first book, one who never found sanctuary in Alsacia. Instead, on a trip to Paris with his wife and young daughters, he meets Alexandre Dumas's three musketeers, who drag him away on an international quest that teaches Michael important truths about the multiverse. Moorcock himself brought the term multiverse in its contemporary sense into speculative fiction in the 1960s, and he takes obvious delight in playing with the concept. The writer's innovation makes the character's stubborn skepticism in the face of the fantastical especially baffling, and readers may grow frustrated with the fictional Michael. The intricately woven plot threads and complex prose do not welcome the reader in gently, but it's nevertheless an engrossing tale, especially in the lively second half. This will be best enjoyed by dedicated Moorcock fans.
