Livres - Bibliographie

The Left Hand of God by Paul Hoffman is the gripping first instalment in a remarkable trilogy.

"Listen. The Sanctuary of the Redeemers on Shotover Scarp is named after a damned lie for there is no redemption that goes on there and less sanctuary."

The Sanctuary of the Redeemers is a vast and desolate place - a place without joy or hope. Most of its occupants were taken there as boys and for years have endured the brutal regime of the Lord Redeemers whose cruelty and violence have one singular purpose - to serve in the name of the One True Faith.

In one of the Sanctuary's vast and twisting maze of corridors stands a boy. He is perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old - he is not sure and neither is anyone else. He has long-forgotten his real name, but now they call him Thomas Cale. He is strange and secretive, witty and charming, violent and profoundly bloody-minded. He is so used to the cruelty that he seems immune, but soon he will open the wrong door at the wrong time and witness an act so terrible that he will have to leave this place, or die.

His only hope of survival is to escape across the arid Scablands to Memphis, a city the opposite of the Sanctuary in every way: breathtakingly beautiful, infinitely Godless, and deeply corrupt.

But the Redeemers want Cale back at any price... not because of the secret he now knows but because of a much more terrifying secret he does not.

The Left Hand of God is a must read. It is the first instalment in a gripping trilogy by Paul Hoffman. Imagine if Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials met Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose. Fans of epic heroic fiction will love this series.

Return to the Sanctuary of the Redeemers: a place of pain, cruelty and terrible, dark devotion. Thomas Cale - the Left Hand of God, the Angel of Death - is put in charge of an army and groomed to bring about the end of the world.

But might not Cale - killer, strategist, pawn and boy - whose nature is far stranger than even the Redeemers can know, have his own reasons for bringing about the Last Four Things?

Thomas Cale has been running from the truth. Since discovering that his brutal military training has been for one purpose - to destroy God's greatest mistake, mankind itself - Cale has been hunted by the very man who made him into the Angel of Death: Pope Redeemer Bosco.

Cale is a paradox: arrogant and innocent, generous and pitiless. Feared and revered by those created him, he has already used his breathtaking talent for violence and destruction to bring down the most powerful civilisation in the world.

But Thomas Cale is weak. His soul is dying. As his body is wracked with convulsions he knows that the final judgment will not wait for a sick boy. As the day of reckoning draws close, Cale's sense of vengeance leads him back to the heart of darkness - the Sanctuary - and to confront the person he hates most in the world. Finally Cale must recognise that he is the incarnation of God's rage and decide if he will stand against the Sanctuary of the Redeemers and use his unique skill of laying waste to all things. The fate of mankind rests on Cale's decision.