Savoy Books: The Golden Strangers

		The Golden Strangers Henry Treece 1980 b/w illustrated 193mm x 125mm Soft covers Reprint of 1956 John Lane Bodley Head edition Distributed by New English Library 224 pp ISBN 0 86130 018

Set in the grey, twilight world of the Stone Age, the story of a young prince—Garroch—who tries to repel the invasion of Britain by the 'Golden Strangers'. The Apocalyptic Movement's main spokesperson (best known as a children's writer of such books as The Dream Time and Legions of the Eagle), Henry Treece wrote a succession of adult historical fiction before his premature death in 1966. Savoy reissued his best novels, the Celtic Tetralogy, of which this is the first. Introduction by Michael Moorcock, stencil illustrations by James Cawthorn, cover art by Michael Heslop. Edited by Michael Butterworth. Contains Treece's essay Notes on Perception and Vision, his last and probably fullest personal account of his philosophy as a novelist, written a month before his death in June 1966.

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"This is the story of the centuries...which has yet to see a conclusion."

MICHAEL MOORCOCK

"One of the best as well as one of the strangest historical novels that I have met."

ROSEMARY SUTCLIFFE

"Through a stark and unmitigated realism Henry Treece conveys what it must have been like to believe in magic."

M JOHN HARRISON

"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