The Years Of Rice And Salt

The Great Plague destroyed Europe. It made the world a different place . . . From award-winning author of the 'Mars' trilogy comes the most ambitious alternative history novel ever written.

As Bold Bardash, a horseman in the army of Temur the Lame, rides west across the steppe and on to the Magyar Plain, he comes across a town in which everyone lies dead. Long dead. Plague has struck Europe. Kali's black blanket has fallen over the lands of the West and nothing will ever be the same again.

Into this empty land pour the opportunists: the merchants, slavers and warlords. The Chinese cross the oceans in their huge fleets; the Arabs traverse the deserts by camel and mule and the Mediterranean by dhow. The last Europeans killed or enslaved - consigned to the seraglios of the sultans.

So die the ancestors of Da Vinci and Copernicus; Columbus and Machiavelli; the Spanish Inquisition and the Conquistadors; Shakespeare, Newton and the Pilgrim Fathers; Einstein and Hitler. And the world becomes a different place.