Will I love Between Two Fires?

Buehlman is an excellent writer - in my opinion he's a cut above the great majority of successful writers out there. I love his prose and the way he animates his story. He's an efficient writer who leans into (wonderful) dialogue to do a lot of the heavy lifting. He can do in 10 words what many writers will waffle for a paragraph to do half as well.

One of the most masterfully-wrought novels I’ve had the pleasure to read.

Here we follow a bitter, veteran knight, Thomas, wounded at the Battle of Crecy and divested of his landholdings, as he leaves behind a life of brigandage in order to deliver a young oddball girl to Avignon.

All the while France descends into chaos, not just because of the bubonic plague, but because the forces of heaven and hell are locked in a battle for the fate of humankind. Freighted with pathos and lyrical in its allegory, this is a novel that will both inspire and terrify you.

My God, this book. This book. It was so unsettling, so eerie, and yet so lyrically deft that I often found my jaw open in wonder. A mediaeval horror set in France during the Black Death, it tells of a young girl who believes she has seen the Angels of God. I picked it up expecting to drag my way through it and instead found it so absorbing and hallucinatory that I couldn’t read it fast enough. Worth noting also that it manages to be both apocalyptic and very funny which is quite a feat!