The Alchemist - A Novel

Informationen zum Autor Donna Boyd lives in a restored turn-of-the-century barn in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where she is now working on her next novel. Klappentext In a sweeping epic of dazzling magic, soaring suspense, and dark longing, three immortal souls are united by fate and a fearless ambition that will change the course of history-even as it destroys their own way of life. . . . On an upper floor of a plush, high-security building on Central Park West, an elegant man sits in the office of Dr. Anne Kramer, confessing to the heinous murder that has horrified the modern world. Randolf Sontime is renowned for his personal charm, and Dr. Kramer is fighting to keep from falling victim to it. For the first time in her life, she truly understands the meaning of the word "charisma.” Not knowing that her own destiny is irrevocably tied to his, Anne Kramer listens to the story of Sontime's life. "It began with the magic, you see. And so, perforce, must I.” As a boy named Han at the House of Ra, an isolated oasis in the Egyptian desert of a far ancient time, Sontime lived in privilege. There the chosen were trained in the science of alchemy-magic, philosophy, miracles. Only two other initiates were as skilled as he: Akan, quiet and studious, a boy whose thirst for knowledge was matched only by his hunger for truth; and Nefar, beautiful and brilliant, a girl as filled with wonder and unfathomable ambition as Han himself. Together they discovered that in union, theirs was a power unmatched in the physical world. But even in the House of Ra, there were boundaries to be observed, knowledge that only the masters understood and feared. As the threesome's thirst for answers-and for each other-deepened, they were tempted by the dark arts that they had sworn to avoid. "Look at three magnificent youths who stand astride your world and scoff at the rules you must obey. . . . Look at us, and call us gods.” Their power was palpable, their desire total-until the fateful moment when their alliance was forever damned, their gifts horribly corrupted. A seductive work that seethes with mystery and passion, The Alchemist hurtles readers back through time to an era when magic was sacred and the workings of the world lay in the hands of a few gifted, but tortured souls. In a stunning feat of unbridled imagination, Donna Boyd has created her most hypnotic novel to date. Leseprobe Imagine if you will the days spinning backward: a millennium ends here, a century turns there, a year ends now, and another, and a thousand others, and finally there are so many days, so many years ending and beginning that you can no longer remember why it seemed important that you keep count of them at all. And yet I have counted them. I have counted every one, marking the beginning of each new year, of each new century, in my own quiet fashion: a glass of wine, perhaps, a silent toast. The world revolves, the view changes. Now I stand atop a castle turret, now upon the deck of a sailing ship. Here I gaze upon an ageless river, there a body-strewn battlefield; now I see the dancing lights of the Champs d’Elysée, now I see the smoldering fires of a fallen civilization. The years change, but the question does not. Will this be it? I ask myself. Will this be the year I tell my story, the whole of it, from beginning to end, at last? And what a lovely entertainment it has been, all these thousands of turning years, to imagine the telling, the circumstances of the telling, and the reason for the telling. I have created the scenario and variations upon scenario over and over again in my mind. Where to begin? How best to glorify or debase myself in the telling, how to find the thread of truth that, in the end, must be the summation of any man’s life–even if that life has been as long and as tangled as mine. So now the time has come, and...

Produktdetails

• Autoren: Donna Boyd
• Verlag: Ballantine
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Taschenbuch
• Erschienen: 01.07.2003
• EAN: 9780345462367
• ISBN: 978-0-345-46236-7
• Seiten: 240
• Abmessung: 140 mm x 207 mm x 14 mm
• Thema: Belletristik > Spannung