Ash a secret history epub

I skimmed a few pages of an online preview of this before I bought it, and every fiber of literary discernment in my being hissed at me like Gollum, " Gentleses is a stinksy writer, Precious, we will hates iiiiit! However, I was intrigued by the subject matter, and the reviews were good, so I bought it anyway. I should have listened to my literary instincts. The proble I skimmed a few pages of an online preview of this before I bought it, and every fiber of literary discernment in my being hissed at me like Gollum, " Gentleses is a stinksy writer, Precious, we will hates iiiiit!

The problems are apparent right from page one. Bask in the wretched awkwardness: It was her scars that made her beautiful. I guess I'll have to take your word for it.

Up until then, as she toddled between the mercenaries' campfires scrounging food, suckling bitch-hounds' teats, and sitting in the dirt, she had been called Mucky-pup, Grubby-face, and Ashy-arse.

When her hair fined up from a nondescript light brown to a white blonde it was 'Ashy' that stuck. As soon as she could talk, she called herself Ash. She was not a virgin. All the stray children played snuggling games under the smelly sheepskin sleeping rugs, and she had her particular friends. These two mercenaries were not other eight-year-olds, they were grown men. Otherwise I would have assumed they were eight-year-old mercenaries. Because she still cried, he made another petulant slash that opened her cheek parallel under the first cut.

Squalling, she pulled free. Blood ran down the side of her face in sheets. I assume it was red-hot, because otherwise what's the point of heating up the dagger in the first place?

The child-raping mercenary didn't want her wounds to get infected? God, this book is stupid. She was big enough to pick up his cocked crossbow carelessly left ready on the wagon for perimeter defence and shoot a bolt through the first man at close quarters. The third scar neatly opened her other cheekbone, but it came honestly, no sadism involved. Two full centuries before the Marquis de Sade? An anachronism, but it's supposed to be a modern translation of a medieval manuscript, so okay, whatever.

But how the fuck does a scar open a cheekbone?! People do. She would not run. She groped among the burst ruins of the first mercenary's body and buried his eating-knife in the upper thigh of the second man, piercing his femoral artery. He bled to death in minutes. Remember that she had already begun to train as a fighter.

When that happens it's time to pack it in and read something else. Gentleses we hates it foreverrrr! View all 15 comments. Mary Gentle created a wide variety of interesting and complex characters. The military details were fascinating and very convincing and I've no doubt Gentle knows her stuff. This long and sprawling historical fantasy sprinkled with speculative fiction was a very pleasant surprise, considering I was never interested in a warrior's panoply or in military fantasy. The human aspect of war was covered very well.

Highly recommended! View all 13 comments. Aug 22, Wastrel rated it it was amazing Shelves: fantastika-unbounded-fantasy , z , z , brilliant. The first thing that should probably be said about Ash: A Secret History is that it's probably the apex of the epic fantasy genre - or at least, the best thing written in the genre since The Lord of the Rings.

Ash was published in the same year as George R. Martin's A Storm of Swords , with which is shares a great deal - but it's pretty straightforwardly better in every respect. It was published the same year as Robin Hobb's Ship of Destiny - but, while I've gotten more out of Hobb's long Realm The first thing that should probably be said about Ash: A Secret History is that it's probably the apex of the epic fantasy genre - or at least, the best thing written in the genre since The Lord of the Rings.

It was published the same year as Robin Hobb's Ship of Destiny - but, while I've gotten more out of Hobb's long Realm of Elderlings cycle as a whole 17 books and some short stories and counting , that's probably mostly because of weight of characterisation and emotional connexion that can be established over such an immense scale not to mention that Hobb's plots unfold across at least three novels at a time , and I think it's only fair to say that, as a single work in its own right, Gentle's novel probably achieves more than any single one of Hobb's.

In its vitality, its colloquialism, its sporadic brutality, it presages the work of authors like Joe Abercrombie Indeed, "a bit like The First Law , but better in every single way" wouldn't be a bad first analogy - with all due respect to a very popular author, it makes those books like a child's crayon imitation of an Old Master painting they once glimpsed.

The first few decades after The Lord of the Rings were arguably dominated by the desire to imitate that work, or at least to find a way to reach a compromise between it and more conventional modern fiction. The last few decades have in a way been dominated by the desire to move decisively away from that text, to find something different that fantasy can be. At least in the realm of epic fantasy, that search seems to have been answered by Ash. Unfortunately, that answer seems to have been lost unheard in the wilderness.

The second thing that should probably be said about Ash is that I'm not sure it actually is an epic fantasy. It straddles the boundaries of historical fiction, alternate history, epic fantasy, and science fiction, with a little but important dash of postmodernism too in the form of interleaved e-mails correspondance by the 'translator' of the original 'text', and the meta-fiction of that translation, which is cunningly woven into the narrative itself.

This may be why it's - otherwise unaccountably - escaped notice in the genre. I suppose maybe the third thing to say, if only in the interests of clarity, is that Ash is a novel about a young, female mercenary commander in what at first appears to be - and sort of is - 15th century Europe. But I don't want to say much more. This is a novel where even the genre is arguably a spoiler.

Really, talking about anything more than a few pages into the novel is a spoiler. Right, then The fourth thing to say might be that very few people seem to have an ambivalent reaction to Ash. As a very rough metric: of the first 30 reviews that show up for me on GR, 20 of them are 5-stars, 2 are 4-stars, 3 are 2-stars one 'confused', one 'swamped', and one who thought it was 'too long' , 2 are 1-stars neither of whom read much of it , 2 don't give stars, and only 1 is a 3-star.

Indeed, the most liked review gives it 5, and the second-most-liked review gives it 1 probably because he only read 25 pages, and hence didn't make it as far as chapter If you read this book, you'll probably love it indeed, a lot of GR reviews list it as one of the reviewer's favourite books ever - if I've not been clear, that's true of me, too.

If you don't love it Why is that? Well, so far as I can see, there are two reasons to dislike this book: - a total disinterest in its topic and themes, or even repulsion from them; or - a complete failure to get the point.

You might, for example, not like this novel because, quite reasonably, you only read page novellas. Ash , by contrast, is over 1, pages long. Ash can see your so-called 'doorstopper tomes', and can crush them into a pulp beneath its unparalleled mass. There are only a handful of novels in the history of fantasy or, indeed, any genre that are longer than it, and none of them are standalones it's substantially longer than The Lord of the Rings , for example.

Now, personally, when that wordcount is NOT an excuse for sightseeing and procrastination, but is packed to the gills with action and adventure and character work, I see that length as a bonus, not a disqualifying flaw; but you may disagree.

I'll concede that, cliffhangers aside, it's not one for people who want immediate gratification You might not like it because you refuse to read fantasy, or anything with a hauberk in it. Or, you might not like it because you only read fantasy about hauberks and the occasional dragon, and you get distressed when you don't quite understand what's going on, or when there's quantum involved, or pyramids, and you just hate it if every things get weird. You may also not like this novel because you want stories about fluffy pink bunny-rabbits who live inside rainbows.

This would not, then, be the novel for you. This is a novel about life and warfare in some unreal, heightened, subtly and less subtly fantastical version of the middle ages, and a lot of people get killed or injured, occasionally in some detail.

Gentle helpfully throws some traumatic childhood experiences, battlefield injuries and a little educational animal-killing into the prologue just to warn people of a swooning disposition away - no, the rest of the book will not in general be that brutal, but little bits of non-gratuitous, character-advancing, realistic adversity will be waiting for many of the characters over the course of the novel, and if that's not something you're ready for then Come to think of it, just the first page of the prologue makes that pretty clear.

Just the first couple of paragraphs. This is not the Belgariad. It's not Harry Potter. And speaking of the first few paragraphs, people may in particular refuse to recognise the quality of the book because of its protagonist. Gentle picks up the over-used fantasy trope of the supernaturally badass tomboy with a traumatic past - and she looks at what that really means. At the sort of world that would produce such a woman, and at what such a woman would really look like. So if you're somebody who pretends to want "realistic" fantasy as an excuse for hating anything with a strong woman in it, this book isn't for you.

But at the same time, if you're somebody who pretends to want "positive messages for women" while actually just reflexively dismissing anything "problematic" as a fashion statement, this book is also not for you. It's all about problematic. In fact, it's downright interested in problems.

And on that note, let's move on from the introductory statements and say clearly: if you're interested in epic fantasy even slightly, and neither length nor a little unpleasantness only a little of which is actually depicted graphically is going to put you off, then you should read this book.

Specifically, why should you read it? Yes, it's really long, but almost every chapter ends in a cliffhanger. I probably haven't been glued to a novel in this way for a decade - since the last and first time I read this novel, in fact. And the couple of books that might have been similarly exciting in that time-period were much shorter, so the total excitement here So much is happening that characters rarely have time to rest and hang out, but through all the action and the arguments, Gentle skilfully establishes a cast of rounded, understandable, individual and sympathetic characters, and makes us care what happens to them.

If you want a fascinating yet believable world where every detail makes you want to find out more, this is the book for you. As an added bonus, most of this incredibly setting is Gentle has a history degree, and a masters in war studies, and a hobby of historical re-enactment From the geopolitical balances to the battle tactics to the specific places that the armour rusts or rubs, down to the shoes they wear when its muddy, Gentle gives us a pre-modernity that's vividly lived-in, dirty, that matters to the people who inhabit it, rather than being, as some fantasy makes it feel, something seen third-hand, blurred, a short-hand we're not really meant to pay attention to.

And that depth and understand in turn feeds into the characters, who as a result are not merely 20th century Americans dropped into king arthur's court, but men and women who have grown up in a world very alien to ours. It's filled with twists you won't predict, and its ending - or endings - are mindblowing. And why might you not like it? Well, as mentioned above, maybe you just want a wholly different sort of book.

You might also be an afficionado of the great poets, and object to the fact that Gentle's prose is at best good, and at worst solid rather than truly, poetically sublime. You might want a deeper insight into The Nature of Human Existence - because this novel does have some insights into that, but there's only so much philosophising can be fit between the pages of a thrilling adventure story.

You might feel that the conclusion of the novel, while stunningly no, really, I was physically stunned ambitious, doesn't actually work, and that the novel is a bit anticlimactic in the last few dozen pages as a result - I strongly disagree, and indeed the final few pages may be my favourite of the entire novel, but I acknowledge that Gentle takes a big running leap here and whether she sticks the landing may be something some people may reasonably disagree with me on.

You may also feel that the novel is just too much of everything , and run out of energy somewhere around the page mark. Personally, after a fevered week of reading, I took a rest for a few days to recharge my mental energy for the final climax to avoid hitting the wall. If you don't do that, you might find that the steadily mounting tension and tantalisation overcomes you, and you end up pulling your hair out and screaming into the night.

It's better not to do that. If you feel like you can cope with these things, however, you should read Ash: A Secret History , because it's absolutely brilliant. If that's not persuaded you, or if you've read it and want to compare thoughts in more depth, I've written a full review of this for my blog , but it's insanely long.

View all 4 comments. Jul 22, Scurra rated it it was amazing Shelves: science-fiction , alt-history. This is one of those books where what is going on in the footnotes is as important as the main text - the conceit here is that a historian is supposedly annotating a recently discovered medieval manuscript that recounts the history of Burgundy in the 13th century, but there is a lot more going on here than meets the eye.

And, as the story progr edit: this review relates to the single volume edition of a book which was published in the US as a four-volume series, even though it's a single novel. And, as the story progresses, it seems that what went on in the past is affecting the future, but why and how?

An extraordinary tour-de-force of "alternative history", utterly convincing in the small details and almost too plausible in the large ones. It also deals with a period of history that is infrequently used in fiction - that time between the Crusades and the Renaissance in Europe, when borders were still in flux, and war was the natural state of affairs. It helps that Mary Gentle is a historian of warfare too; the battles have a gritty realism that is often lacking from similar ventures, but she doesn't stint on the human interaction either: there are a couple of sequences that reduced me to tears, so invested was I in the characters' stories.

Your war is unjust. Rather than sue for peace, I will die here on the land that my father ruled, and his fathers before him.

There is not a man of Burgundy, be he never so poor a peasant, nor a man who has asked sanctuary of Burgundy, who shall not be defended with all might, all main, and all the prayers that we may raise to God. Someone else can take my place. It is all accident, all chance. Fortuna imperatrix mundi.

Aug 30, Errant rated it it was amazing. This is a hard story. Not in the sense that it is difficult to read, but in the sense that it is often harsh, brutal, even crude. The squalor and brutality of middle ages just spring to life, the characters are all fully realized, nuanced and not even the protagonist is entirely good or entirely evil. There is magic, and although it is a very central point, it is also low-key, poetic and fully integrated with the historical and cultural background.

There are some science fiction touches more than This is a hard story. There are some science fiction touches more than a few even, but most of the story is closer to an uchrony with fantastical elements. The storytelling structure allows the author to do away with infodumps elegantly while furtering the plot, it is really amazingly done. I recommend it to anyone who can stomach full-blown grittiness. Mary Gentle is a master and authors like JV Jones or KJ Parker -Tom Holt- whose stories carry a similar vibe are mere students: at least for her grittiness is just background, not the point of the story at all.

Oct 14, Francis rated it it was amazing. The first edition of the novel was published in June , and was written by Mary Gentle. The book was published in multiple languages including English, consists of pages and is available in Paperback format.

The main characters of this fantasy, historical story are ,. Please note that the tricks or techniques listed in this pdf are either fictional or claimed to work by its creator. We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you. Some of the techniques listed in Ash: A Secret History may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them.

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