The Bastard of Colonia

Long before he was the hammer of the Franks, Charles Martel was a boy with an awkward claim on his father's name. This opening volume of The Song of the Francs goes back to the end of the seventh century to tell his early years: the son of Pepin of Herstal, the future grandfather of Charlemagne, growing up in the Frankish world around Colonia, the old Roman name for Cologne.

It is a long, generous novel about a period few writers touch, when the Merovingian kingdoms were giving way to a new dynasty. For readers who like their historical fiction early medieval and rooted in real lives, and who want to see a famous figure before history made him one.