Fire in the Steppe

Close on the heels of the magnificent With Fire and Sword and The Deluge, comes this impassioned tale of love, war, heroism, treason and betrayal, with which the great classic Trilogy of Poland's most popular 19th century writer is brought to an end. Fire in the Steppe is the final book of Sienkiewicz's literary masterpiece which grips and enthralls just as powerfully today as it did when it was first published in Polish in 1883-1889. It is an epic tale of love and adventure set in the savage wilderness of Poland's eastern borderlands in the 17th century, and it is also the most realistic of Sienkiewicz's novels. The Trilogy's most memorable heroes, Pan Zagloba and Pan Volodyovski, are joined here by the unforgettable Basia, whose own adventures ring with strength, courage and determination against the bloody background of raids, border battles, and invasion by the awesome armies of the Turkish Empire in 1672. Told by a master storyteller who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905, Fire in the Steppe concludes the stories of the Trilogy's fabulous heroines and heroes who live, love and die in these pages of Poland's most enduring epic. As in the first two books, it is a masterful blend of history and imagination in which the East and the West of their era confront each other in an all-out battle, and a handful of devoted men and women makes a heroic stand. Foremost among them is Pan Volodyovski, the Little Knight of The Deluge and With Fire and Sword, and the brave, loving Basia, who rides to war beside him and overcomes terrifying dangers of her own. The inimitable Pan Zagloba, one of literature's most successfully drawn comic anti-heroes, lives, drinks, orates, and flourishes beside them along with a new cast of hard-riding border knights, ruthless villains, and devoted soldiers. Chief among them is the indomitable Basia who brings love to Pan Volodyovski and destruction to a dangerous abductor; the tragic Eva and her brother Adam whose trust and caring bring them to disaster; the driven and ambitious Azia Mellehovitch whose terrible end is the bloodiest and most horrifying in Europe's 19th century literature; and dozens of others. As in all three novels of the Trilogy, Fire in the Steppe dazzles with a gallery of kings, sultans, generals, magnates, Turkish janissaries, merciless bandits, brave soldiers, and other fictional and historical figures who created the era in which this book is set. Rich in action, drama, humor, cruelty and heroism, they are as thrilling and absorbing today as in their own time. First put into English from a Russian text more than 100 years ago, Fire in the Steppe comes brilliantly back to life in this rich new adaptation for the modern reader directly from Polish, and it illuminates the hopes, history and ethnic memory of the Polish people, along with all those other newly liberated nations who live in Eastern Europe.