Although this took me an unconscionable amount of time to get through (almost two weeks), I DID really enjoy it. This is also a novel coping with the sexual confusion of the times, especially in terms of homoerotic love and feelings, still condemned, something to be frightened of and to suppress at all costs; and yet the several passion moments end up being so deeply felt, sensual and authentic. After seeming to escape a troubled past, he falls in love with a fellow warrior, who passionately accepts and teaches him of the love between men, yet their own obsessive behavior threatens to destory everything they hoped to build. In other words, he is a multifaceted and contradictory character and I found myself drawn to him like a moth to a flame.

But Jacob is also afraid of being discovered as the murderer of a local boy and, as armed horsemen arrive on the very day of his wedding feast, it prompts a series of impetuous, temper-fuelled bad decisions: Jacob flees, dragging his new wife and one of his brothers with him. Her first-person narrative and turns of phrase have an authentic seventeenth-century feel to them, and her main character Jacob is a magnificent creation. But Ferris is intent on establishing a commune, a prospect Jacob reviles, yet to keep his lover he has no choice but to join the motley band. Something you should know before reading this book because he draws you into his world and makes you love him, hate him, weep for him by turns as he destroys everything he loves and - for what?I've been talking about this book with some of the lovely people I've met here on GR and even 'gently' pushed some friends to read it. He has that trait where he's drawn to save people, and there can be hubris in that, as well as goodness. His life is not smooth, and he's not really an opportunist - I mean, okay, if we want to talk about fictional characters that might be sociopaths, Scarlett O'Hara is probably much closer to that profile.

He didn’t even meet the girl until she was locked in her room by her father, across the lane from him. Which is why, next to this amazing cover, the inaccurate and misleading blurbs for this and every other edition I examined, are so much of a puzzle. Maria McCann does an incredible job at keeping the tension up - the novel is like a rollercoaster, full of twists and turns, ups and downs, jolting rises and terrifying drops. For myself, I love history, I love food and I love good descriptions and an in-depth yet not overly heavy tone.I think the part that cut me the deepest is the fact that Ferris truly seemed to love Jacob, and that he loved him still even in the end, after all the things that Jacob did, including their last brutal sexual encounter. He even dumped poor Nathan without a word, and as far as I know nothing more than a shirt looted from Basing to run off with a man who he knew he couldn’t change. Every time I finish this book I'm somehow simultaneously in love, and appalled, and exhausted and kind of afraid, and in awe, and I just never know what to do with myself.