Marian L. Thorpe on her Empire\’s Legacy series

Today’s guest post comes courtesy of Marian L. Thorpe, the author of Empire’s Legacy trilogy (out now as complete omnibus version in paperback and e-book – an absolute steal at $5.99) – one of my favourite reads of the year so far.

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Marian L. Thorpe author photoBjørn asked a hard and insightful question: what is my series, Empire’s Legacy, really about? At first glance, they might appear to be a simple adventure-romance trilogy, set in an early-medieval world, with people a lot like Gaels and Vikings and Saxons vying for power and land, and the memory of the Roman Empire just barely alive.

At first glance. But about half-way through the first of the trilogy, Empire’s Daughter, the character Casyn says this to my protagonist, eighteen-year-old Lena: “…we cannot shape the circumstances to fit our lives, only our lives to fit the circumstances. What defines us, as men and women, is how we respond to those circumstances.”

Much of the Empire’s Legacy series looks, through its protagonist’s eyes, at the difficulty and the price of taking personal responsibility for the choices we make in life, good or bad; about shaping our responses to events – political and personal – that change our lives. This isn’t to say my characters are Panglossian, or Pollyannas. They know they don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, and that not all is sweetness and light. Life throws some horrible things at them: war, betrayal, violence, loss, rejection. It’s unfair. Some of it is imposed by forces beyond their control. Some of it is a direct result of personal choice, and some of it is a combination of those things.

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