Synopsis
The newest novel from the World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Bell at Sealey Head.
With "her exquisite grasp of the fantasist's craft"* (Publishers Weekly) Patricia A. McKillip now invites readers to discover a place that may only exist in the mystical wisdom of poetry and music.
Scholar Phelan Cle is researching Bone Plain-which has been studied for the last 500 years, though no one has been able to locate it as a real place. Archaeologist Jonah Cle, Phelan's father, is also hunting through time, piecing history together from forgotten trinkets. His most eager disciple is Princess Beatrice, the king's youngest daughter. When they unearth a disk marked with ancient runes, Beatrice pursues the secrets of a lost language that she suddenly notices all around her, hidden in plain sight.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Curiously enough, as if casting a ruminative look backward at her own long career, McKillip's latest -- The Bards of Bone Plain -- deals explicitly with the storytelling urge, finding much to say about why and how we tell tales, and where they fit into any healthy culture. Yet there is no smidgen of preachiness or boasting at work in her lovely narrative.