She Was a Queen: Historical Novel

She was indeed a Queen. Born a peasant in thirteenth-century Burma, Queen Saw--young, beautiful, and extremely intelligent--reigned beside two kings. Everything luxuriantly cruel or voluptuously lovely swirled around the royal White Umbrella: mandarins, oracle-eating tigers, murdersome intrigue, egg-sized emeralds, concubines, fearsome magic, Tartars, and groveling courtiers (with elbows calloused as thickly as the soles of their feet). Queen Saw happily survived all--her two husbands as well as the Mongol invasion. Wonderful in its details and historical lore, the chief enchantment of She Was a Queen is the storytelling style of Maurice Collis. A book by him, Eudora Welty noted, "is as strategically put together and as fantastically simple as a fairy tale; and it affects us, quite aside from the scholarship of Mr. Collis, with that true belief we gave fairy tales when children."

Product details

• Authors: Maurice Collis
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.06.1991
• EAN: 9780811211697
• ISBN: 978-0-8112-1169-7
• No. of pages: 301
• Dimensions: 136 mm x 202 mm x 22 mm
• Weight: 363 g
• Series: New Directions Revived Modern
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature