Book description
THE EVENING OF THE WORLD is set in the period of the barbarian
invasions. Its hero is a young Roman nobleman named Marcus. He undergoes
extraordinary experiences as he searches for meaning and stability in a
twilight world where the old gods are dead or dying, but their mysteries
still attract, and the new religion is threatened by new barbarisms.
Marcus?s journeys take him over the empire, from Italy to Greece and
Byzantium, to the camp of Alaric the Goth and the wastes of the northern
forests, from a Christian monastery to the horde of Attila the Hun. His
is a world where everything is possible and nothing solid, a world that
is full of danger and mystery, of love and terror, of simple faith and
abstruse philosophy, of cruelty, strange perversions, treachery and
undaunted courage. Allan Massie is the author of seventeen highly
praised novels, as well as non-fiction works on Muriel Spark, a study of
twelve emperors of ancient Rome, a history of crime in 19th-century
Edinburgh and the acclaimed Glasgow: Portraits of a City. Born in
Singapore in 1938, he was brought up in Aberdeenshire and educated at
Glenalmond School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read history.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been a judge
of the Booker Prize. He is also a journalist contributing to the
Scottish and English press. He is married, has three children and lives
in the Scottish Borders.
