First in a new trilogy of the albino prince, Elric of Melnibone.
'I was used to that fear. I expected little else. All humans had it. I despised it. No such weakness was allowed to infect the blood of a Melnibonean. My folk has ruled the world for ten thousand years. They had determined the histories of the Young Kingdoms, those nations of human kind. My race was older, wiser and infinitely crueller than men . . .'
In the 1930s, Count Ulric von Bek has been harried and imprisoned by the Nazis for a black sword which is part of his family's history - and for the Grail, which his cousin Gaynor believes is also in his care. Almost dead, he is rescued from Sachsenhausen concentration camp by two unknown figures - an Englishman called Bastable and an albino girl, Oona. With them, he journeys to a strange underground world. And there he meets a figure known to him only from dreams, in which they are somehow the same person, yet separate: Elric of Melnibone.
As their stories intertwine, von Bek comes to know of Elric's past, and recent history and their very beings become one. Sometimes Elric is in control, sometimes Ulric. And the never-ending struggle between Law and Chaos must be fought out in both their universes, with the help of the enigmatic Dreamthief's Daughter.
Michael Moorcock returns triumphantly to his best-known character, the albino prince, Elric of Melnibone. In the first of three new tales of the doomed swordsman, he plaits differing realities effortlessly, mixing the eternal city of Tanelorn with the rise of Hitler's Germany.
