Far from Danube

‌Christopher Buxton is an English writer and translator whose work is steeped in Bulgarian history and culture. He is the author of historical novels in a Bulgarian context, Far from the Danube, Radoslava and the Viking Prince and Surge. More recent history is reflected in The Devil’s Notebook and the satirical black comedy Prudence and the Red Baron. He has written two children’s novels, The Princess Commander and the Seven Scallywags and In the Desert beyond the Labyrinth. He has published an anthology of Bulgarian classic poetry. One of the notable qualities of his work is that it is devoid of the clichés of extreme exoticism, often favoured by popular authors who set their work in the Balkans.

Far from the Danube is the story of an extraordinary woman who rescued a heavily wounded knight from a battlefield in northern Bulgaria and managed to return him to a less than grateful family in Normandy, just as the Hundred Years War was about to start.

Set against the national and religious conflicts of the early 15th century this is a powerful account of a hazardous journey into exile and of a love between Maria Iskra and Gilles Guiton that flew in the face of contemporary mores, given that as a knight of St John, Gilles had taken a vow of chastity. Based on a recorded meeting between English King Henry V and Maria Iskra following the battle of Azincourt, and on considerable local research in Normandy, this novel brings real events to dramatic life.