Before George R. R. Martin there was Dorothy Dunnett . . .
THE PERFECT GIFT for fans of A Game of Thrones.
'She is a brilliant story teller, The Lymond Chronicles will keep you reading late into the night, desperate to know the fate of the characters you have come to care deeply about.' The Times Literary Supplement
Checkmate is the sixth and final book in the series
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'If they place the sun in my right hand and the moon in my left and ask me to give up my mission, I will not give it up until the truth prevails or I myself perish in the attempt . . .'
It is 1557 and legendary Scottish warrior Francis Crawford of Lymond is once more in France. There he is leading an army to rout the hated English from Calais.
Yet while Lymond seeks victory on the battlefield he is haunted by his troubled past - chiefly the truth about his origins and his marriage (in name only) to young Englishwoman Philippa Somerville.
As the French offer him a way out of his marriage and his wife appears in France on a mission of her own, the final moves are made in a great game that has been playing out over an extraordinary decade of war, love and struggle - bringing the Lymond Chronicles to a spellbinding close.
'A masterpiece of historical fiction' Washington Post
'Melodrama of the most magnificent kind' The Guardian
Frequently described as the finest historical fiction writer of her time, Dorothy Dunnett earned worldwide acclaim for her blend of scholarship and imagination. She is best known for her two superb series of historical fiction - The Lymond Chronicles and The House of Niccolo - set in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and ranging across Europe and the Mediterranean, and for King Hereafter, the eleventh-century story of Earl Thorfinn of Orkney whom Dorothy believed was also King Macbeth. In 1992, Dorothy Dunnett was awarded the OBE for her services to literature, and in 2014 Dunnett's most enduring hero, Francis Crawford of Lymond, was voted Scotland's favourite literary character - beating the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Harry Potter and Ivanhoe. Dunnett died 9 November 2001, having sold half a million copies internationally.
