Adam Roberts | THE BLACK PRINCE

UNBOUND | Literary Fiction

‘The novel I have in mind, and for which I’ve done a ninety-page plan, is about the Black Prince. I thought it might be amusing blatantly to steal the Camera Eye and the Newsreel devices from Dos Passos just to see how they might work, especially with the Black Death and Crécy and the Spanish campaign. The effect might be of the fourteenth century going on in another galaxy where language and literature had somehow got themselves into the twentieth century…’ – Anthony Burgess, Paris Review, 1973

The story of Edward, the Black Prince’s campaigns in fourteenth-century France is brought to vivid life by the acclaimed novelist Adam Roberts. Based on a completed screenplay and the notes for an unfinished novel by Anthony Burgess, and using a variety of narrative styles -from disorientating depictions of medieval battles to court intrigues and betrayals, Roberts reveals himself as an author in complete control of the novel as a way of making us look at history with fresh eyes, all while staying true to the linguistic pyrotechnics and narrative verve of Burgess’s best work.

The Black Prince is exuberant, unconventional, saturated with gorgeous and awful detail, funny, gripping and vivid – a stunning historical novel in its own right, as well as an authorised edition to the Burgess canon.