'Writers like Hoffman are too rare. This wonderful book gripped me from the first chapter and then dropped me days later, dazed and grinning to myself.' - Conn Iggulden
“The first moment I saw him when he was very young there was something about him that I could put my finger on. It took me a long time before I recognised the feeling. It was dread. I dreaded this little boy.”
"Listen. The Sanctuary of the Redeemers on Shotover Scarp is named after a damned lie for there is no redemption that goes on there and less sanctuary."
The Sanctuary of the Redeemers is a vast and desolate place - a place without joy or hope. Most of its occupants were taken there as boys and for years have endured the brutal regime of the Lord Redeemers whose cruelty and violence have one singular purpose - to serve in the name of the One True Faith.
In one of the Sanctuary's vast and twisting maze of corridors stands a boy. He is perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old - he is not sure and neither is anyone else. He has long-forgotten his real name, but now they call him Thomas Cale. He is strange and secretive, witty and charming, violent and profoundly bloody-minded. He is so used to the cruelty that he seems immune, but soon he will open the wrong door at the wrong time and witness an act so terrible that he will have to leave this place, or die.
His only hope of survival is to escape across the arid Scablands to Memphis, a city the opposite of the Sanctuary in every way: breathtakingly beautiful, infinitely Godless, and deeply corrupt.
But the Redeemers want Cale back at any price... not because of the secret he now knows but because of a much more terrifying secret he does not.
The Left Hand of God is a must read. It is the first instalment in a gripping trilogy by Paul Hoffman. Imagine if Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials met Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose. Fans of epic heroic fiction will love this series.
“ Aren’t you a bit small for the Wrath of God, Mr Cale?’
‘I could cut your head off and stand on it. Then I’d be be taller.’”
The Last Four Things is the second in Paul Hoffman's remarkable series.
Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell
These are the Last Four Things
Now there are Five
Meet Thomas Cale.
Returning to the Sanctuary of the Redeemers, Thomas Cale is told by
the Lord Militant that the destruction of mankind is necessary; the only way to undo God's greatest mistake.
Cale seemingly accepts his role in the ending of the world: fate has painted him as the Left Hand of God, the Angel of Death. Absolute power is within his grasp, the terrifying zeal and military might of the Redeemers a weapon for him to handle as simply as he once used a knife.
But perhaps not even the grim power that the Redeemers hold over Cale is enough - the boy who turns from love to poisonous hatred in a heartbeat, the boy who switches between kindness and sheer violence in the blink of an eye. The annihilation that the Redeemers seek may well be in Cale's hands - but his soul is far stranger than they could ever know.
The Last Four Things follows on from The Left Hand of God. It is the second instalment in a gripping trilogy by Paul Hoffman. Imagine if Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials met Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose. Fans of epic heroic fiction will love this series.
“By the time you are fourteen-years-old the worst thing that will ever happen to you will probably already have taken place.”