The Sacred Virgin and the Spurned Bride is a new novella by Dolan Cummings.
Banished from Bamburgh for murky reasons, Freia arrives with her fatherless child at the Northumbrian frontier court of Edinburgh. There just might be a future for them there, but much depends on the good graces of powerful men like Earl Edwin and perhaps the enigmatic Pictish Bishop Boniface. And there’s always prayer.
Meanwhile, the bishop’s niece Euphemia has not one but two fatherless children. When her busy uncle asks her to seek out and read a new ‘History of the Picts’ on his behalf, she has cause to reflect on her own murky past as well as her family’s. But, as illuminating as the manuscript is, the past is not everything. When the two mothers cross one another’s paths, it is with hope of redemption.
Dolan’s previous novel was The Pictish Princess and other stories from before there was a Scotland.
In a land uneasily divided between four nations – Picts, Gaels, Britons and Northumbrians – but united by a thousand stories and a single faith (just about), a girl can dream.
Monks, mercenaries and mothers can also dream. But dreams can be dangerous. They lead to lost babies, twins torn apart, fatefully mistaken identities and unchosen transformations.
Over the course of twenty years, a handful of dreamers from all four nations cross paths, culminating in a series of revelations, confrontations and reconciliations. There are battles, sieges and political intrigue as well as love lost, love found, betrothal, betrayal and – perhaps – a kind of magic.
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Before that came Gehenna: a novel of Hell and Earth, an exploration of morality, justice and the human soul, loosely modelled on Dante’s Hell and adding a modern Scottish twist to the Florentine’s tale.
His first novel was That Existential Leap: a crime story. Part bildungsroman and part psychological thriller, it is also a novel of ideas about the struggle for self-realisation and belonging in the postmodern West.
This website also hosts a selection of book reviews, essays and other articles Dolan has written over the years. You can browse by category using the drop-down menu.
Dolan Cummings 