To Lie with Lions

"The year is 1471; the time, the dawn of the modern era and the Age of Exploration; the location, both the palaces and the wild places of Europe; and the man, Nicholas de Fleury - a former dyer's apprentice whose innate qualities of intelligence, audacity, and determination have propelled him to the very summit of economic power and political influence.". "No novelist matches Dorothy Dunnett's skill in bringing to life the vigorous, innovative spirit of the fifteenth century, and no one has ever created a character who epitomizes that period more perfectly than her "Niccolo." In the five previous books of this series - synopsized in an introduction to this volume - Nicholas has accumulated a vast fortune, a private army, a network of allies and informants, and a formidable list of enemies. At the end of The Unicorn Hunt, the novel that precedes To Lie with Lions, he wrests his little son Jordan from his estranged wife, Gelis, and sails off into the Venetian night. To Lie with Lions opens several months later, as Nicholas reappears with the boy in Marseilles, draws his wife back to his side, and is soon caught up in the intrigues of the French, Scottish, and Burgundian courts, all vying for the services his money and genius can provide. He and Gelis, passionately at odds since their wedding night, engage in a no-holds-barred contest for control of their son and of their mutual destiny. Their deadly serious "game" changes the lives of everyone in their orbit and takes Nicholas from Scotland and the frozen volcanic wastes of the north to the easternmost limits of Europe: Cyprus, kingdom of James de Lusignan, friend and foe of his youth.". "As the rivalry of husband and wife is played out in the quicksands of Renaissance politics, the feudal civilization in which they were born is slowly giving way to the modern understanding that commerce, not religion, makes the world turn - that it is entrepreneurs like Nicholas and Gelis, rather than the kings and the prelates, who have the greatest power to shape the course of history. So deft is Dorothy Dunnett at re-creating the sights and sensations of this long-gone world that this brilliant history lesson becomes the invisible but all-pervasive subtext of a romantic story that twists and turns through relationships both sublime and tragic, in fabulously rendered settings of cinematic vividness."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.