The Proud Prince

What happens to innocence when it meets absolute power? This is the question at the heart of The Proud Prince, a lush historical novel set in medieval Sicily at the moment a kingdom turns rotten. Perpetua has lived her entire life on a mountain above Syracuse, shielded from the world's cruelty by her father, the royal executioner. She knows nothing of courtly intrigue, nothing of the new king whose cruelty has already begun to echo through the kingdom. When Diogenes, the court jester, arrives with tidings of Robert the Bad's ascension, Perpetua's peaceful existence shatters. She is about to discover that the purity of her mountain retreat exists in precarious balance with the corruption below, and that the son has made himself a monster while the father was still warm in his grave. McCarthy weaves a tale of forbidden love, political machinations, and the moral decay that spreads like plague when good men do nothing. The Proud Prince is a meditation on power's seduction and its victims, dressed in the garments of Gothic romance.