The Nameless Day (Crucible)

The Nameless Day, the first volume of Sarah Douglass's new 'Crucible' sequence, is set not in some faraway fantasy realm but in what both is and is not the Middle Ages of the Hundred Years War and the Black Death, a Middle Ages strangely truncated so that the Black Prince's conquest of France and Joan of Arc's attempt to save it are going on at the same time. Something demonic is going on -- a mysterious faction within the Church has failed to take the precautions that need to be taken and something has been unleashed: it is precisely because no-one trusts the warrior turned priest, Thomas Neville, that he finds himself lumbered with investigating what went wrong with the last journey of Brother Wynkyn thirty years before. Thomas thought his life was over having made the wrong choices, and gave up his old life to repent perpetually. But finding himself considered expendable by almost everybody and everything starts to change his mind.

This is an ingenious, passionate and more than slightly loopy fantasy, with vividly evoked landscapes of dangerous deadly beauty and ultimate disgust; the flawed self-hating Neville is as intriguing a character as Douglass has given us. -- Roz Kaveney