The Ringed Castle, Dorothy Dunnett
The Ringed Castle, Dorothy Dunnett
List: $30.00 | Sale: $21.00
Club: $15.00

The Ringed Castle
Book Five in the Legendary Lymond Chronicles

Author: Dorothy Dunnett

Narrator: David Monteath

Unabridged: 25 hr 12 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/14/2019

Synopsis

For the first time Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles are available in the United States in quality paperback editions.

Fifth in the legendary Lymond Chronicles, The Ringed Castle leaps from Mary Tudor's England to the barbaric Russia of Ivan the Terrible. Francis Crawford of Lymond moves to Muscovy, where he becomes advisor and general to the half-mad tsar. Yet even as Lymond tries to civilize a court that is still frozen in the attitudes of the Middle Ages, forces in England conspire to enlist this infinitely useful man in their own schemes.

About Dorothy Dunnett

Dorothy Dunnett was born in 1923 in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland. Her time at Gillespie's High School for Girls overlapped with that of the novelist Muriel Spark. From 1940-1955, she worked for the Civil Service as a press officer. In 1946, she married Alastair Dunnett, later editor of The Scotsman.

Dunnett started writing in the late 1950s. Her first novel, The Game of Kings, was published in the United States in 1961, and in the United Kingdom the year after. She published twenty-two books in total, including the six-part Lymond Chronicles and the eight-part Niccolo Series, and coauthored another volume with her husband. Also an accomplished professional portrait painter, Dunnett exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy on many occasions and had portraits commissioned by a number of prominent public figures in Scotland.

She also led a busy life in public service, as a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, a trustee of the Scottish National War Memorial, and director of the Edinburgh Book Festival. She served on numerous cultural committees, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In 1992 she was awarded the Office of the British Empire for services to literature. She died on November 9, 2001, at the age of seventy-eight.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Melindam

After the Opium-High that was Pawn in Frankincense, this book is almost "slack" and "subdued", but that was to be expected, I guess. There were parts where this was only 3 stars for me (and those parts were related to Lymond's stay in Russia, despite Diccon Chancellor's shining star), but as a whole......more

Goodreads review by Brittany

I remember this book as being the one where you have to slog through a lot of Russian things to get to the "good" parts, which are Philippa coming into her own in the French, Scottish, and English courts. I am beginning to believe that Dunnett actually wrote these books about Philippa, she just didn......more

Quotes

“Exciting, dangerous, fascinating.”
—The Boston Globe

“[Dunnett’s] hero. . .is as polished and perceptive as Lord Peter Wimsey and as resourceful as James Bond.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Vivid, engaging, densely plotted. . . . Dunnett is a master of suspense and misdirection.”
—The New York Times

“A masterpiece of historical fiction.”
—The Washington Post

“[Lymond] is arguably the perfect romantic hero.”
—The Guardian

“Dorothy Dunnett is one of the greatest talespinners since Dumas . . . breathlessly exciting.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Dunnett is a name to conjure with. Her work exemplifies the best the genre can offer.”
—Christian Science Monitor

“Ingenious and exceptional . . . its effect brilliant, its pace swift and colorful and its multi-linear plot spirited and absorbing.”
—Boston Herald

“Dunnett evokes the sixteenth century with an amazing richness of allusion and scholarship, while keeping a firm control on an intricately twisting narrative. She has another more unusual quality . . . an ability to check her imagination with irony, to mix high romance with wit.”
—Sunday Times (London)

“A very stylish blend of high romance and high camp. Her hero, the enigmatic Lymond, [is] Byron crossed with Lawrence of Arabia. . . . He moves in an aura of intrigue, hidden menace and sheer physical daring.”
—Times Literary Supplement (London)

“With shrewd psychological insight and a rare gift of narrative and descriptive power, Dorothy Dunnett reveals the color, wit, lushness . . . and turbulent intensity of one of Europe’s greatest eras.”
—Raleigh News and Observer

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