NORMANDY, 1256. A BOY'S MUTILATED BODY IS FOUND IN THE WOODS NEAR A BENEDICTINE ABBEY.
When Amaury de la Roche, commander of the Knights Templar, returns to his family's seat, his sister has already brought a blood-soaked stranger back from the forest. Melanie d'Eville calls herself the victim of a terrible crime. The Inquisition calls her a witch. Amaury must decide who to believe before the fire is lit.
A sardonic friar leads him to a prophecy that reaches far beyond anything a Norman knight was meant to know. His path binds him to people he should never have met: a shaman from the Mongolian steppe and a young woman out of Novgorod. Their languages, their gods and their ideas of the world could hardly differ more. And still, an old story seems to tie their fates together.
What begins as a fight for family and survival becomes a journey through a medieval world where Christian faith collides with older traditions, power with superstition, and every miracle might also be a deception.
A curse gnaws at the house of de la Roche. And the song that lies over all of it is far from finished.
For readers of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Katherine Arden's The Bear and the Nightingale.
An excerpt from the novel was longlisted for the Etnopero 2025 Literary Award.
Content note: Graphic violence, a non-linear structure, and several timelines.
Senator Matthew Krasinski built his life on despising the weak and shutting out outsiders. He was the face of power and success.
But when disaster rips America apart, the man who once preached walls now has only ten hours to save his family. Each mile on the road tears away the mask of power and civility.
Who will stand as ally, and who as enemy?
And most of all—who will Matthew become when survival is all that’s left?
A tense, fast-paced dystopian political thriller about collapse, power, and the brutal choices of family survival.
The Krasinski Collapse is a lean, propulsive dystopian thriller with the pace of a survival thriller—a post apocalyptic novel of political, personal, and moral reckonings, and the stubborn human urge to choose compassion when nothing else remains.
Author bio
Andrey Kot writes humorous fantasy, dark historical fantasy, and stories of survival.
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