Bloodtide

By Melvin Burgess

'Love. Hate. So what? This is family. This is business.'

London is in ruins. The once-glorious city is now a gated wasteland cut off from the rest of the country and in the hands of two warring families – the Volsons and the Connors.

Val Volson offers the hand of his young daughter, Signy, to Connor as a truce. At first the marriage seems to have been blessed by the gods, but betrayal and deceit are never far away in this violent world, and the lives of both families are soon to be changed for ever . . .

'Shies from nothing, making it both cruel and magnificent' Guardian
'An epic tale of treachery, deceit, sex, torture, violence, revenge and retribution' Independent on Sunday
'Will rank along with the 20th-century classics' - Sunday Telegraph
Winner of the Lancashire Book Award

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andersen Digital
• Release date: Aug 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781849396660

Melvin Burgess

Melvin Burgess is the author of many novels for young adult and middle-grade readers. Among them are Nicholas Dane, Doing It (a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age), The Ghost Behind the Wall (Bank Street Best Children's Book of the Year) and Smack (winner of Britain's Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Prize for Fiction, as well as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults).  In 2001, he wrote the novelization of the film, Billy Elliot. Mr. Burgess lives in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, in England.

Reviews for Bloodtide

[isabelx_21 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"Bloodtide" is a retelling of the first part of the Saga of the Volsungs, the story of the twins Sigmund (here called Siggy) and Signy. It is set in a futuristic London, abandoned to gangsters when the government moved out to Ragnor and cut-off from the rest of the country, by a no-man's land populated by halfmen (human/animal hybrids).The story of the twins takes up less than 20 pages in my copy of the saga, and this has given the novelist a lot of scope for fleshing out the story and the characters, without losing any of the savagery, brutality or passion of the original.Whereas the saga has Odin thrusting his knife into the tree that grows up through the great hall of the Volsung's palace, this book has him thrust it into the diamond-hard glass elevator shaft full of the hanged bodies of human sacrifices, that rises up to the broken tip of a skyscraperEven the fact that he has the old Norse gods appearing in the city leaving death and destruction in their wake (gods are wont to do) works, as the gang lords and citizens of London only half believe in the gods, suspecting that they may be cyborgs sent from Ragnor.Supposedly it's for teenagers (which is quite surprising considering how dark and violent it is), but it's an exciting read for adults too!