A Legend of Reading Abbey

England, 1135. The old king is dead and the kingdom bleeds. As Stephen and Matilda tear the crown apart between them, a young Benedictine novice named Felix tends his books within the ancient walls of Reading Abbey, a house of God that has never known war on its soil. But civil war has a way of finding every sanctuary. When a mysterious infant is left at the abbey gates wrapped in cloth bearing a noble seal, Felix and his brothers are thrust into a web of intrigue they were never meant to unravel. The child becomes a beacon for those who would turn faith into a weapon, and the monks must choose between their vows and the dangerous loyalties pressing in from every side. MacFarlane, drawing on years of research into the real Reading Abbey and the brutal period historians call the Anarchy, renders twelfth-century England with the visceral intimacy of someone who has walked its muddy roads and smelled its smoke-blackened halls. This is historical fiction for readers who want their past raw, human, and utterly without mercy.