100,000+ Books, Games & Puzzles in-stock 🇳🇿

Overnight NZ-wide delivery on in-stock orders 🚀

The Tears

Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
The Tears follows the intertwined lives of twins Nithard and Hartnid, sons of Charlemagne’s daughter Bertha, set against the backdrop of medieval Europe. Nithard, a scholar and lay abbot, joins his cousin Emperor Charles the Bald on military campaigns, while Hartnid embarks on a daring journey as far as Baghdad in pursuit of a mysterious female vision haunting his dreams. The narrative weaves historical detail with poetic imagination, exploring themes of nature’s joys, the deep connections among living beings, and the pivotal events that shaped cultures and languages, including the origins of French.
Read More
Format: Hardback
$4699
AVAILABLE WITH SUPPLIER Ships from our Auckland warehouse within 3-4 weeks

Found a better price? Request a price match

Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

Ideal for readers who appreciate historical fiction richly layered with speculative history, poetic prose, and philosophical themes, especially those interested in medieval Europe and French cultural origins.

Book Hero thinking about your next read

"First published in French as Les Larmes"--T.p. verso.

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

A novel of intersecting historical threads.

The Tears is, at one level, a novel about the turbulent lives of twins, the sons of Charlemagne’s daughter Bertha. The studious and scholarly Nithard succeeds his father Angilbert as lay abbot of the Abbey of Saint Riquier in Normandy and accompanies his cousin, the emperor Charles the Bald, on his military campaigns. His twin brother Hartnid strikes out boldly for more exotic parts—including, eventually, Baghdad—in a seemingly deranged quest to track down the elusive female face that haunts his dreams.

Yet this novel of intersecting historical threads and patches of poetic reimagining is crisscrossed by a host of other themes: the enigmatic joys afforded by nature, the intimate relation between living creatures which literature has since earliest times depicted, and the mysterious power of contingent events that have shaped entire cultures—including the birth of the French language itself. This heady brew of medieval chronicle, miraculous folktale, and speculative reconstruction of history further strengthens Pascal Quignard’s status as one of France’s most imaginative contemporary writers.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781803090641

Publisher: Seagull Books London Ltd

Format: Hardback

Date Published: 19 April 2023

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Seagull Books London Ltd

Audience: Professional and scholarly

DIMENSIONS

Width: 5.0mm

Height: 8.0mm

Weight: 250g

Pages: 200

About the Author

Pascal Quignard is one of the foremost literary French writers. Chris Turner is a translator and writer who lives in Birmingham, UK.

Also by Chris Turner

View all
  • "The `Scandal` of Marxism" and Other Writings on Politics
    A major collection of essays and interviews from an iconic 20th-century philosopher in five volumes, now all available together in paperback. Roland Barthes was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator—often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another—he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some...
    Paperback
    $3199
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • Signs and Images – Writings on Art, Cinema and Photography
    A major collection of essays and interviews from an iconic 20th-century philosopher in five volumes, now all available together in paperback. Roland Barthes was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator—often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another—he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some...
    Paperback
    $3199
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • "A Very Fine Gift" and Other Writings on Theory
    A major collection of essays and interviews from an iconic 20th-century philosopher in five volumes, now all available together in paperback. Roland Barthes was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator—often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another—he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some...
    Paperback
    $3199
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • Critical Essays – Volume 1, 1944–1948
    This first book in a three-volume collection of Georges Bataille’s essays introduces English readers to his philosophical and critical writings. In the aftermath of the Second World War, French thinker and writer Georges Bataille forged a singular path through the moral and political impasses of his age. In 1946, animated by "a need to live events in an increasingly conscious...
    Hardback
    $5699
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • "Masculine, Feminine, Neuter" and Other Writings on Literature
    A major collection of essays and interviews from an iconic 20th-century philosopher in five volumes, now all available together in paperback. Roland Barthes was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator—often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another—he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some...
    Paperback
    $3199
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • Tort Law
    Key Facts Key Cases: Tort Law will ensure you grasp the main concepts of your Tort Law module with ease. This book explains the facts and associated case law for: The torts of negligence, occupiers’ liability and nuisance Strict liability torts The torts of trespass to land and trespass to the person Torts involving goods Torts affecting reputation Employment related...
    Paperback
    $8999
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Unlocking Legal Learning
    Unlocking Legal Learning is an essential textbook for undergraduate students new to legal study. By explaining the different fields of this intricate subject and helping you to develop the skills to engage with it successfully, Unlocking Legal Learning will provide you with an essential foundation for your studies and future career. This third edition is fully up-to-date and incorporates new...
    Paperback
    $10900
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Unlocking Contract Law
    The Unlocking the Law series makes the law accessible. Each chapter contains activities such as quick quizzes and self-test questions, key facts charts to consolidate your knowledge, and diagrams to aid learning. Cases, judgments, and primary source quotations are prominently displayed. Summaries help you understand each chapter, and there is a glossary of legal terminology. New features include problem questions...
    Paperback
    $11800
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks

Also by Pascal Quignard

View all
  • Dying of Thinking – The Last Kingdom IX
    A deeply contemplative work devoted to thinking from one of the foremost literary figures of contemporary France. Dying of Thinking is the ninth volume of Pascal Quignard’s Last Kingdom series. It explores three themes: how thought and death coincide, how thought is close to melancholy, and how thought takes shelter near traumatism. One who thinks, Quignard shows us, "compensates" for...
    Hardback
    $4799
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • Mysterious Solidarities
    When translator Claire Methuen travels back to her hometown of Dinard for a family wedding, she runs into her old piano teacher, Madame Ladon. After befriending the ageing woman, Methuen begins to toy with the idea of a permanent return to live in Brittany. She becomes increasingly obsessed by her childhood sweetheart, Simon Quelen, who, now married and a father,...
    Hardback
    $4699
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • The Fount of Time
    “Last Kingdom is a set of books that... is neither philosophical argumentation nor little disparate, scholarly essays, nor novelistic narrative; gradually, for me, all genres have fallen away.” So writes Pascal Quignard of his monumental book series, Last Kingdom. In the latest volume, The Fount of Time, he focuses on the paradoxically immediate presence in our lives of the deepest,...
    Hardback
    $4699
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • The Unsaddled
    A captivating and wide-ranging interpretation of accidental dismounting. In Pascal Quignard’s writing, philology hunts for wild game in a dark forest. The Unsaddled, which features horses as its central figure, is no exception. Taking off from puns, multifarious imagery, and metaphorical meanings—“to be baffled,” “to be thrown”—that the book’s title provides, Quignard focuses on life-changing moments. We meet George Sand...
    Hardback
    $4699
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • The Roving Shadows
    A bold and adventurous work of literature that explores the relationship between reading, writing, sex, and death. The first book in Pascal Quignard's Last Kingdom series, The Roving Shadows can be read as a long meditation on reading and writing that strives to situate these otherwise innocuous activities in a profound relationship to sex and death. Writing and reading can,...
    Paperback
    $3599
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • The Silent Crossing
    A haunting homage to life and liberty, to society and solitude, and to the binding and unbinding that constitute the weft of our lives. Drawing on materials from across many cultures, Pascal Quignard makes an effort to establish shared human values as the breeding ground for a modern Enlightenment. Considering atheism as a spiritual liberation, suicide as a free act,...
    Paperback
    $3599
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • The Paradisiacs
    Pascal Quignard delves into the uncanny bond between recognition and loss, outlining how our earliest experiences shape our longing for a paradise we can never reclaim. What if paradise was not a place we lost, but one we never truly knew? In The Paradisiacs, the fourth volume of the Last Kingdom series, Pascal Quignard meditates on the nature of paradise—not...
    Hardback
    Sold Out

More from Historical Fiction

View all
  • New Release
    The Parisian Chapter
    From the New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Library and The Librarians of Rue de Picardie comes a charming and cinematic novel following a young woman from Montana who lands a job in the American Library in Paris, where she discovers the power of storytelling and writes her own Parisian chapter.'Stirring and rich with detail' New York Times...
    Paperback
    $2999
    Elsewhere:
    $3499
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • New Release
    Inferno
    AD 60. Nero Claudius Caesar is Emperor. He is feared for his temper. He is known to be intoxicated by the power he wields. And why not? The Roman Empire stretches from the wilds of Britain to the deserts of Parthia. Nero is god of all he surveys. Yet dangerous traitors lie close at hand. Generals commanding legions. Senators whispering...
    Paperback
    $3100
    Elsewhere:
    $3800
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Circle of Days
    From the master of epic fiction comes the deeply human story of one of the world's greatest mysteries: the building of Stonehenge. A FLINT MINER WITH A GIFT Seft, a talented flint miner, walks the Great Plain in the high summer heat, to witness the rituals that signal the start of a new year. He is there to trade his...
    Hardback
    $4499
    Elsewhere:
    $6000
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • The Soldier's Daughter
    The heart-stopping new blockbuster by the bestselling author of The Fallen Woman. Violet Nash has grown up in the shadows of her father Charlie's shattered dreams. It's been years since he walked away from the battlefields of France, a WWI hero but his heart in tatters, only to see it broken all over again in the worst way possible. In...
    Paperback
    $2999
    Elsewhere:
    $3800
    (1)
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • The Girl with the Suitcase
    The enthralling new novel from the 10-million-copy, No. 1 bestselling author. London 1941 When Mary meets a glamorous stranger named Elizabeth, she realises their lives couldn't be more different. But when an air raid forces them to take shelter underground, Mary's life is set to change forever. After waking up in hospital, injured but alive, the nurse mistakes her for...
    Paperback
    $2999
    Elsewhere:
    $3800
    (1)
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • The Lost Bookshop
    Evie Woods' stunning new novel The Story Collector is available now. The Echo of Old Books meets The Lost Apothecary in this evocative and charming novel full of mystery and secrets. ‘The thing about books,’ she said ‘is that they help you to imagine a life bigger and better than you could ever dream of.’ On a quiet street in...
    Paperback
    $2200
    Elsewhere:
    $2500
    (2)
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • All the Diamonds in Paris
    Kristin Harmel is firmly in the top echelon of WW2 storytellers - HEATHER MORRIS A master storyteller - SANTA MONTEFIORE The best at sweeping historical drama - KELLY HARMS A dazzling diamond of a novel - HAZEL GAYNOR * Paris, 1942: Anabel Martinet is a jewel thief, descended from a family that has spent centuries stealing from the unkind and...
    Paperback
    $2999
    Elsewhere:
    $3799
    (1)
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • The Listeners
    ‘By turns a beautiful love story, a fascinating glimpse into the horrors of history and a haunting tale of loyalty and courage. A marvel of storytelling’ CHRIS WHITAKER, bestselling author of All the Colours of the Dark The Avallon Hotel offers unrivalled luxury in the wild Appalachian Mountains, its curative sweetwater washing away the troubles of high society. June 'Hoss'...
    Paperback
    $3600
    Elsewhere:
    $3799
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • The Song of Achilles
    The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller is a brilliantly crafted retelling of the ancient Greek epic of Achilles and Patroclus, transforming the classical myth into a profoundly moving love story. Set against the richly depicted backdrop of Greece during the heroically tumultuous age, the narrative follows Patroclus, an awkward and exiled young prince, who is taken to the court...
    Paperback
    $2100
    Elsewhere:
    $3999
    (3)
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • The Cardinal
    Step into the thrill and intrigue of Tudor England in the rich, compelling new novel from Sunday Times bestseller Alison Weir. Alison Weir makes history come alive as no one else BARBARA ERSKINE AN EXTRAORDINARY RISE TO POWER. A TRAGIC FALL FROM GRACE. It begins with young Tom Wolsey, the bright and brilliant son of a Suffolk tradesman, sent to...
    Paperback
    $3400
    Elsewhere:
    $3799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Mythos
    Mythos by Stephen Fry is a compelling retelling of the classic Greek myths, reimagined with a wit and elegance that only Fry can deliver. This volume transports the reader to a world where mortals intertwine with the divine, and the timeless tales unfold in a spellbinding narrative that captures the imagination. From the cosmogony—the birth of the cosmos—to the exploits...
    Paperback
    $2200
    Elsewhere:
    $3000
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • On Sale
    15% off
    The Four Winds
    Kristin Hannah is a classic storyteller and The Four Winds sees her at the top of her game - Matt Haig Powerful and compelling - Delia Owens, number one international bestselling author of Where the Crawdads Sing A story of love, family, unbreakable bonds, bravery and hope. I loved this book so much! - Christy Lefteri, bestselling author of The...
    Paperback
    $1700
    Elsewhere:
    $2499
    In Stock
    Ships today

Why buy from us?

Book Hero is not a chain store or big box retailer. We're an independent 100% NZ-owned business on a mission to help more Kiwis rediscover a love of books and reading!

Service & Delivery

Service & Delivery

Our warehouse in Auckland holds over 100,000 books, toys, board games and puzzles in-stock so you're not waiting for your order to arrive from overseas.

Auckland Bookstore

Auckland Bookstore

We're primarily an online store, but for your convenience you can pick up your order for free from our bookstore, which is right next door to our warehouse in Hobsonville.

Our Gifting Service

Our Gifting Service

Books make wonderful thoughtful gifts and we're here to help with gift-wrapping and cards. We can even send your gift directly to your loved one.