I’m taking a brief break from the current blog series because the trade paperback of Caleb Carr’s latest novel, The Legend of Broken, has been released today. The US paperback has the same cover design as the hardcover, while the international paperback has a new cover design (shown to the right) that is extremely similar to the e-book released last year. The paperback also contains a new cast of main characters list with pronunciation guide that wasn’t included in the hardcover. Very handy!
If you haven’t already given The Legend of Broken a go, I highly recommend it. For more information about the novel, you can view my thoughts in my original blog post from earlier in the year, and I have included a few comments below from The Washington Post’s review of the novel that I think provides a reasonably good overview of the work. You can also listen to an interview Caleb Carr gave about the novel at the WAMC Radio Book Show website, or watch a talk and Q&A that he gave at a book signing for the novel last year.
The Legend of Broken has also been released in audiobook format by Simon & Schuster Audio, read by George Guidall and Tim Gerard Reynolds. You can read a comprehensive review of the audiobook at Dab of Darkness.
The Washington Post:
Set circa 745 A.D., during Europe’s Dark Ages, “The Legend of Broken” straddles the line between epic fantasy and alternate history … an excellent and old-fashioned entertainment that evolves into a clever discourse on the history and development of modern warfare. Best known for novels like “The Alienist” and “The Angel of Darkness,” Carr is also a noted military historian. “The Legend of Broken” has none of the fin-de-siecle trappings that distinguished his earlier novels, but his gift for integrating historical detail with lurid spectacle rivals those on display in the much-missed BBC/HBO series “Rome.” … Carr’s depiction of 8th-century Europe as a gallimaufry of religions, superstitions, science and cultural tradition is marvelous: His Dark Ages contain incandescent flashes of insight into an era that itself is often resigned to a mere footnote … At its best, “The Legend of Broken” seamlessly blends epic adventure with serious research and asks questions that men and women grappled with in the Dark Ages and still do today.
