LES PARDAILLAN

The greatest French adventure novelist you've never read.

Michel Zévaco (1860-1918) holds the same place in France that Alexandre Dumas holds in the English-speaking world: a master of historical adventure fiction, beloved by millions, acknowledged by Sartre as a writer of genius. His ten-volume Pardaillan cycle - published between 1902 and 1918 - has never been seriously translated into English. Until now.

France, 1553. Two brothers love the same woman. One marries her in secret. The other destroys her. From this act of betrayal, a vendetta is born that will sweep across the French Wars of Religion - through the court of Catherine de Medici, the streets of Paris on the eve of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and the shadow wars between Catholic and Huguenot.

At the heart of the storm stands Jean de Pardaillan: swordsman, vagabond, lover, and the most dangerous man in France. Armed with nothing but a battered rapier, a stray dog, and the worst advice his father ever gave him, he will defy princes, mock assassins, and fall desperately in love - all before breakfast.

The Pardaillan is swashbuckling fiction at its most exhilarating: part Dumas, part Sabatini, part political thriller. It is a novel of duels fought at midnight, of secret marriages and poisoned courts, of old soldiers and young wolves, of a France tearing itself apart - and of one man too stubborn, too brave, and too in love to stand aside.

This edition:
This is the first complete, literary English translation of Volume I of Les Pardaillan. The sole prior attempt (2009) was widely noted for its errors. Volumes II through X have never been translated at all.

Translated by Edgard Bronce-Ceray with fidelity to Zévaco's distinctive voice: vivid, rhythmic, ironic, and unapologetically populist.

For readers of Alexandre Dumas, Rafael Sabatini, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, and Patrick O'Brian.