Author Highlight: Jessica Knauss

For the month of December I'm doing an author highlight once a week, so I hope you can find some new books to read. These are all authors who won the Kindle Scout contest. I won in 2015 with Solstice.

Today, I'm featuring J.K. Knauss, author of Seven Noble Knights. An epic of family, betrayal, and revenge medieval Spain, Seven Noble Knights, debuts on Kindle today, and will be available in softcover on January 16, 2017, from Bagwyn Books. Get the ebook instantly here.

Introducing Jessica Knauss:





Jessica's book:
For more about Seven Noble Knights and all the information about its grand blog tour and launch party, visit JessicaKnauss.com. Feel free to sign up for her mailing list for castles, stories, and magic.

Summary:

Spain, 974. Gonzalo, a brave but hotheaded knight, unwittingly provokes tragedy at his uncle’s wedding to beautiful young noblewoman Lambra: the adored cousin of the bride dead, his teeth scattered across the riverbank. Coveting his family’s wealth and power, Lambra sends Gonzalo’s father into enemy territory to be beheaded, unleashing a revenge that devastates Castile for a generation.

A new hero, Mudarra, rises out of the ashes of Gonzalo’s once great family. Raised as a warrior in the opulence of Muslim Córdoba, Mudarra must make a grueling journey and change his religion, then chooses to take his jeweled sword to the throats of his family’s betrayers. But only when he strays from the path set for him does he find his true purpose in life.

Inspired by a lost medieval epic poem, Seven Noble Knights draws from history and legend to bring a brutal yet beautiful world to life in a gripping story of family, betrayal, and love.

Cool map!
I love using maps in my books (my historicals all have them), so I love it when authors put in a map.

From the author:

As readers of this blog know, history is thrilling. Seven Noble Knights takes place in tenth-century Spain, a time when the Spanish language had barely differentiated from Latin, when Castile, which is now the dominant Spanish culture, was a rough-and-tumble borderland, and Córdoba in Andalusia was arguably the most elegant city in the world.

The “Christian” kingdoms in the north were still consolidating their power and starting to ship away at the mighty Caliphate of Córdoba. What would it have been like to be raised as a warrior during this time, with so many expectations that you would hold the front and “reconquer” more territory? How would a noble lady feel, torn from her homeland and obliged to marry someone two decades older than she? Could two people from the different religions understand each other enough to fall in love? And where would the loyalties of someone with family in both north and south lie?