Publishers Weekly on Northlanders
…Sven sees an opportunity to “take his money and run” so to speak, but that’s not so easy. Returning home to the settlement of Grimness, he finds his former family and friends enslaved by his uncle Gorm, who has taken Sven’s inheritance and his brother’s power to put the local populace under his thumb. Therein lies the struggle—does the prodigal son stay and try to help the people and lands he left long ago?
“I like to call him a self-loathing Viking, a guy in the middle of a massive identity crisis,” said Wood. “Sven’s Norse, living in Constantinople, the ‘shining city’, the center of the world at that time. He’s an elite warrior, part of the emperor’s palace guards. He’s a modern guy; he enjoys the mix of cultures in that city. He’s globalized, as much as a person can be. He doesn’t look much like a Viking and that suits him. He doesn’t much care for the culture he comes from, and he strives to transcend it on a daily basis. And that of course [asks] the question: what is he running away from?”
…“Even though Northlanders is set a thousand years ago,” explained Wood, “I do think readers will be able to identify some similarities on the sociopolitical front, from the idea of conflict, of culture wars, of military expansion, dictatorships and the notion of a ‘free’ people. There is also a lot going on, on a personal level, with the characters in the story, as they live in rapidly changing times and struggle to coexist with people so different from themselves.”
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