An absolutely epic saga… these characters get under your skin, into your bones, squeeze your heart, manipulate your emotions… They are beautiful and treacherous and confounding and inspirational, and they own you for the duration of the two parts that make up this novel…and beyond. I’m even going to venture to say that this is one of those 5 star novels that makes the shelf with Anna Karenina and Vilette, with the names of Mary Shelley and Brontë, Dickens and Hardy, somewhere on the 20th Century end of the pile, near the top of the last 200 years of best novels. While not an overly poetic piece of prose, it has its breathtaking moments of literary imagery, traverses cultural lines of diversity with ease, draws us into its sensuality in intimate scenes of awkward tenderness, delivers us into battles and betrayals and beheadings with shocking pain, and definitely should be on the same shelf as some of the classic greats…