Savoy Books: The Dark Island

The Dark Island

Henry Treece

1980

b/w illustrated

193mm x 125mm

Soft Covers

Reprint of 1958 John Lane Bodley Head edition

Distributed by New English Library

240 pp

ISBN 0 86130 021 1

A further novel of Britain, set during the Roman invasion before Christianity has asserted itself. Our Henry Treece titles were first time paperback publications in England and have not been reprinted since. David Britton discovered Treece in the late 1950s. One of his intentions when setting up Savoy Books was to bring Treece to the attention of the new fantasy buying public created by the success of J R R Tolkien and Robert E Howard. Second in Henry Treece's Celtic Tetralogy.

Introduction by Michael Moorcock, stencil illustrations by James Cawthorn.

Cover art by Michael Heslop.

See also Treece's Notes on Perception and Vision in The Revenant Zone.

• A few copies of this title are still available. See the Orders page for purchase details.

"Henry Treece has the rare gift of writing about the ancient world as if he was native to it."

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

"One of the aims of Manchester's independent paperback imprint Savoy is to give exposure to those neglected British writers who influenced SF's New Wave movement, and here Savoy have acquired the rights to a trinity of Fantasy classics. I read Treece at school, and I suspect Michael Moorcock did too. He writes introductions to each volume, and it is easy to draw parallels between Elric and The Golden Strangers set in a 'grey twilight world of the Stone Age when the line between magic and reality was less easily drawn—and more easily crossed than it is today', or to think of Moorcock's Melniboné while reading Captains set after the collapse of a great empire—in this instance Rome, or to compare Moorcock's The Bull and the Spear with Treece's Celtic mythology in Island. Indeed Treece now seems more powerful and relevant than when these books were written, portraying poetry, violence, and the dark undertow of mysticism."

ANDREW DARLINGTON, Ludd's Mill