From the elegance and refinement of Cairo's Madrasa Academy sets out Salah Ibn al Khatib, whose mission is to avenge his wronged family by killing the King of France. In a bizarre and exotic journey the luckless Salah encounters whores and rogues, popes and priests, bishops, kings and queens. And as he penetrates the dark and Boschian heart of Europe something implacable and murderous accompanies him: pestilence.

In rural Eifionydd, on the very edge of civilisation, grinding poverty, hunger, superstition and the shackles of feudalism bind peasants, priests and even the Lady of the Manor. Their lives are all to simply a struggle for life itself. The arrival of Salah, now hopelessly adrift, brings the promise of dramatic change. But can they all survive to reap its benefits?

Wiliam Owen Roberts' prize-winning novel has been compared to the writing of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Boccacio and Voltaire. His vivid picaresque narrative is underlain by a searching enquiry into the medieval life. Translated from its Welsh version, Y Pla, it appears in paperback for the first time.

"Such sharpness in so young a writer as Wiliam Owen Roberts should keep Umberto Eco watching his back and his semiology"
The Times

"Roberts' taut, often sickeningly violent narrative displays an imposing enormity of sedulously mastered information about late-medieval religion, medicine, law and society, and his artfully shaped plot brings its separate stories together, with a savage thrust of irony, at the mockingly 'hopeful' visionary conclusion. Unusually intelligent and memorable."
Kirkus Reviews

William Owen Roberts was born in 1960. He was educated at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he studied Welsh Literature and Drama. He has worked as a script editor and writer for HTV and is now a freelance writer, mainly for television. He has published two novels, Bingo! (1985) and Y PIa (1987) and and has recently completed a third, Paradwys. Y PIa won the Welsh Arts Council Fiction Prize in 1988 and has been translated into several European languages. He received a Welsh Arts Council Bursary for his volume of long short stories, Hunangofiant, published in 1990.

Pestilence - häftad, Engelska, 1997