Tamburlaine Must Die

It is 1593 and London is a city on edge. Under threat from plague and war, strangers are unwelcome and severed heads grin from spikes on Tower Bridge. Playwright, poet and spy, Christopher Marlowe has three days to live. Three days in which to find the murderous Tamburlaine, a killer who has ascaped from between the pages of his most violent play...Tamburlaine Must Die is a swashbuckling adventure story of a man who dares to defy both God and state - and discovers that there are worse fates than damnation.

ISBN 184195604X   DEWEY 823.92 ISBN13 9781841956046 (What's this?)   DEWEY edition DC22 Publisher Canongate Books Ltd   Pages 160 Imprint Canongate Books Ltd   Published in Edinburgh Format Paperback   Height (mm) 198 Publication date 30 Jun 2005   Width (mm) 130 Library of Congress PR6073   Academic level General

"Brilliant... as a thriller, her book is utterly engrossing... Elizabethan England has never seemed more beguilingly immediate... It would be hard to better the physical descriptions with which the book is laced; brawny milkmaids; stinking fishwives; the sails of the windmills on Highgate Hill; alehouses packed with humpbacked fiddlers and blowzy whores drinking Spanish wine. Every vignette, every minor character, every sight, sound and smell, has the ring of truth." Julla Flynn, Sunday Telegraph; "A tale of vivid homoerotic passion, murderous treachery and strutting intellectual pride." Financial Times; "Tamburlaine Must Die refines Welsh's powerful vision of death in a godless world... This bold, imaginative, vibrant novella resonates on several levels. Its claustrophobic airs of menace and betrayal are those of a thriller. It works as historical fiction and captures the Tudor setting by virtue of Welsh's extraordinary prose." David Isaacson, Daily Telegraph; "The sort of narrative that you can smell on your hands after turning the pages, with proper attention paid to the pleasures and perils of illicit sex and the importance of seeing and savouring all that's on offer before the lights go out for good." Philip Oakes, Literary Review; "A page-turner to the very end." Ron Butlin, Sunday Herald"

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